For example, his adoption of traditional Hindu values was bound to lead to disagreement with Muslim India. Unfortunately, his writings do not enlarge our understanding of his failure to capture the Muslims’ imagination and win the confidence of their leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. We can only note that he tried hard – he published a collection of Islamic tests in praise of the spinning-wheel – but without inspiration. The writings furnish occasional references to this issue, but nothing to bear out the fact that the Gandhian tendency to redirect and moralise a political discourse could only offend, not transform, the Muslim minority’s growing sense of its own separate destiny. Gandhi was not always sensitive to the limitations of his methods. Sometimes he recognised that his approach might be inapplicable or unheeded: he declined, for instance, to speak on non-violence to warring Europe – ‘I shall not be able to present to them the science of peace in a language they will understand’ – though he did venture to suggest that non-violent resistance by the Jews against Hitler would have been effective. Gandhi never accepted relativistic arguments: pure non-violence would always succeed, and if non-violence failed, it was because it was impure.