I think you make my point for me: Gandhi never said he was a saint (if you read the Orwell piece to which I linked, Orwell makes the same point) and he pointedly named his early biography, ‘my experiments with truth.’ Holding fast to truth includes neither making things more nor less than what they are. It is others, I think, and not Gandhi, who are creating half-truths for some form of advantage seeking: trying to take him down a peg or two from a height he never placed himself.

It would be remarkable for someone who grew up in the rigid caste system of India in the late 1800’s and who tried very hard to fit into British society to not, at least, echo the racism of the times. To the extent Gandhi remained racist after his time in South Africa, we don’t know. We only have — as far as I know — his early comments which are used to damn his entire tenure on the planet.