Tushar Gandhi

Tushar Arun Gandhi (born 17 January 1960) is the son of journalist Arun Manilal Gandhi, grandson of Manilal Gandhi and great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi.

Born on a train between Mumbai and Kolkata, Tushar Gandhi was raised in Mumbai. 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. He is best known for having established in 1998 in Vadodara, Gujarat the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation. It is now located in Mumbai (and he is still its President). Since 1996, he has served as the President of the Lok Seva Trust, an NGO established by Dr. Kanti Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi 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 (AIRDF). 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. 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 Tushar Gandhi became a Director of the Gandhi Research Foundation in Jalgaon, Maharashtra. And in 2023, Tushar Gandhi was appointed as the Ambassador for “Return to Palestine”. 

He is the author of “Let’s Kill Gandhi” (Rupa Books; 2007) and “The Lost Diary of Kastur, My Ba” (HarperCollins India; 2022). 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.