One of the confusions in the New Age sphere is the legacy of Gandhis one of the worst distortions of activist ideology. Gandhi was one of the most confused pseudo-gurus who was really a European exile educated in England and then returning to India with a pastiche of spiritual rubbish that he could hardly have read. The Gita as the Hindu Bible is a farce, although it has hints of ancient teachings on some points. But Gandhi made this the centerpiece of his non-violent tactics, apparently unaware that the Gita specifically enjoins violence, and along with that the archaic legacy of caste. Because of MLK's classic adoption of Gandhian non-violence the left has take up his tactics, without seeing that they were effective in the Civil Rights struggle against racism, but that the larger issue of slavery, e.g. the Civil War, was no non-violent movement. The tactics of non-violence have no real historical record or legacy. They are an hodgepodge of Gandhians bizarre guru imitation and misinterpretation. Nonviolence appears in the Jain legacy, but it is not a political tactic. It is a form of extreme mediation leading to death given that the yogi cannot realize non-violence without destroying insect life. That classic legacy had no real place in the activism of the modern period where are the achievement of freedom are the result of struggle, sometimes violent.
Gandhian tactics are crypto-violent and in the end lead to far more violence than considered action on the proper scale, e.g. the American Revolution. The current left has lost a precious generation to these tactics which have accomplished almost nothing. In fact they embolden dangerous elites to the sense they will encounter no opposition to their outrages. With gandhian methods, there would be no modern democracy, freedom, rights, or equality. And it is doubtful Gandhi did anything much to gain Indian independence. A real movement would have done the job in the twenties and could have thrown out the British with a revolutionary movement of the American type.

Source:  The New Age mirage versus the antiquity of Indic yogas. – 1848+: The End(s) of History