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Personally, I think he may be the most overrated "pacifist" of the last 200 years. A classic example of "do as I say, not as I do." He was misogynistic, anti-semitic, and a garden-variety hypocrite, which is common among very public moralists.
From Richard Shenkman's Legends, Lies, and Myths of World History:
Gandhi, for starters, had some very strange beliefs. When he was older, he preached that a couple should have sex only three of four times in their lives - although he engaged in a lot of sex when he was younger. He liked to sleep in the nude with naked young women to test his vow of chastity - apparently, sleeping nude with his wife wasn't much of a test. History doesn't record what she thought of this, but I can imagine my wife having a few choice words to say about such a situation.
Speaking of his wife, she died when he refused to allow her to get life saving shot of penicillin after she contracted pneumonia. He was, you see, opposed to modern medicine. But not fanatically opposed, since after her death he allowed himself to be treated with quinine for his malaria and allowed his appendix to be removed by surgeons. Nice guy, huh?
There's a lot more, like the fact that he wasn't always the pacifist that he has been made out to be and his odd fascination for bowel movements - I'll spare you the details of that last one.
Ibid, and culled from The Gandhi Nobody Knows by Richard Grenier:
Gandhi the part-time pacifist:
Although Gandhi became famous for his pacifism, his beliefs here evolved considerably over the years. In fact, until the British massacred hundreds of peaceful Indians at Amritsar, Gandhi was such a faithful British subject that he served in the imperial army.
In the Boer War, Gandhi led the Natal Indian Ambulance Corps and, in one of those weird coincidences, was one of the three future world leaders at the Battle of Spioenkop, along with Winston Churchill and Louis Botha. For his good work, Gandhi eventually won the War Medal and was promoted to sergeant major.
Gandhi also volunteered to serve in World War I, one of the few Indian activists to support England unconditionally. A bad case of pleurisy prevented him from serving, and in fact forced him to leave England and return to India.
Gandhi and World War II:
Gandhi never quite seemed to realize that the non-violence he urged against the British would have failed horribly if applied to the Nazis. He urged the British to surrender, and suggested that the Czechs and even the Jews would have been better off committing heroic mass suicide.
Even as late as June 1946, when the extent of the Holocaust had emerged, Gandhi told biographer Louis Fisher: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs."
As the Japanese advanced into Burma (now called Myanmar), there was a real possibility of an Axis invasion of India. Gandhi thought it was best to let the Japanese take as much of India as they wanted, and that the best way to resist would be to "make them feel unwanted."
(In fact, the Axis was helping a buddy of Gandhi's to raise an army of Indians that would have seized the country from the Brits, but that's another story.)
Gandhi, family man:
He described his wife as looking like a "meek cow."
He refused to allow his sons to get a formal education, and also tried to force his oddball sexual ideas on them. He so disapproved of the wife of his eldest son that the Mahatma disowned him. This son broke from the family and became an alcoholic. In rebellion against everything his father stood for, Harilal Gandhi even announced at one point that he had converted to Islam.
The Mahatma also had trouble with his second son, Manilal, who had an affair with a married woman. Dad made the matter a public scandal and pushed the woman involved to shave her head. Manilal was also briefly exiled from the family for lending money to fellow black sheep Harilal.
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