My nationalism, fierce though it is, is not exclusive, is not devised to harm any nation or individual.

Answering a proposed guarantee of equal commercial rights for British and Indian traders, Gandhi argues that formal equality would preserve the colonial ruling class’s existing advantages. He wants those privileges removed, while protecting British lives and allowing mutually beneficial trade and an honourable association between Britain and a free India. The sentence closes that argument, not a rejection of Indian nationalism.

He insists that devotion to India need not involve excluding or injuring people of other nations.

The line is not an endorsement of the existing colonial trading system: the surrounding article demands that unequal privileges be dismantled before an equal partnership can exist.

Politics, Morality

• I rebel, therefore we are. Albert Camus
• Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the State becomes lawless or corrupt. (paraphrase)
• Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err and even to sin.
• the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; Martin Luther King Jr.
• A writer owes nothing except to his writing. Charles Bukowski

Mahatma Gandhi, Articles in Indian Opinion, Young India and Harijan (1931), The Giant and the Dwarf, Young India, 26 March 1931; Collected Works, vol. XLV, item 397, p. 343. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/my-nationalism-is-not-exclusive/ (30 October 2026).

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