Truth knows no color.

The Colourless Light of Truth

On the night of 7 June 1893, a young lawyer holding a valid first-class ticket was pushed off a train at Pietermaritzburg station in South Africa because a white passenger objected to sharing a compartment with him. The ticket was a fact; the colour of his skin should have been irrelevant to it. Mohandas Gandhi spent that cold night in the waiting room thinking about whether to return to India or to fight, and he chose to fight with a weapon he later called satyagraha, the force of truth. His life became an argument that truth does not change with the colour of the person who speaks it, the party that benefits from it or the faith that dislikes it. Truth itself knows no colour; it is our eyes, our interests and our institutions that colour it, and the task of a mature society is to remove those tints rather than to deny that truth exists.

At its simplest, the statement means that facts are impartial. Newton's laws work the same way in Delhi and in Detroit, and a virus infects without asking a person's caste, creed or nationality. At the Berlin Olympics of 1936, a regime that preached racial superiority watched Jesse Owens, an African-American athlete, win four gold medals. The stopwatch and the measuring tape did not care about the ideology in the stands. India's own motto, Satyameva Jayate, taken from the Mundaka Upanishad, declares that truth alone triumphs, and it does not say whose truth. The Constitution reflects the same spirit in Article 14, which promises equality before the law to every person, and in the blindfold that artists have long placed on the figure of Justice.

Building upon this, history shows how often power has tried to paint truth in its own colours, and how truth has outlasted the paint. When Galileo argued that the earth moves around the sun, the Church forced him to recant in 1633. Yet the earth kept moving, and in 1992 Pope John Paul II formally acknowledged that the Church had erred. After the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, the Hunter Committee split along racial lines: its British majority censured General Dyer only mildly, for a mistaken notion of duty, while its Indian members wrote a separate minority report that condemned the firing. The same facts produced two verdicts because the judges wore different colours. Over time, the verdict of history settled firmly with the minority.

Moreover, colour today is not only racial but political and religious. In a polarised age, a claim is often judged not by its evidence but by the camp of the person making it. The Oxford Dictionaries chose post-truth as its word of the year in 2016, describing a condition in which objective facts shape public opinion less than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Deepfakes and edited videos now allow anyone to manufacture a convincing falsehood within minutes, and rumour on messaging platforms has incited mob violence. When citizens accept only the facts that flatter their side, democratic debate turns into a contest of loyalties instead of a search for solutions.

The newest colour may be hidden inside our machines. Technology is often presented as neutral, but it learns from data produced by a biased world. In the Gender Shades study of 2018, the researcher Joy Buolamwini at the MIT Media Lab found that commercial facial-analysis systems misclassified darker-skinned women far more often than lighter-skinned men. A system trained mostly on one kind of face had quietly acquired the prejudices of its makers. As artificial intelligence begins to screen job applicants, approve loans and assist the police, the danger is that old biases will return wearing the costume of objective calculation. A truth that knows no colour therefore requires algorithms that are audited, explained and corrected.

Yet an honest essay must face the strongest objection to the statement. Many thinkers argue that truth is always seen through a lens. The Jain doctrine of anekantavada teaches that reality has many sides, and the parable of the blind men and the elephant shows each man describing a different truth because each touches a different part. Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon (1950) tells one crime through four witnesses, each version shaped by self-interest. Michel Foucault argued that every society has its own regime of truth, decided by those who hold power. History, it is often said, is written by the victors. If perception is always coloured, is a colourless truth anything more than a comforting myth?

The answer lies in separating truth from our access to it. The many-sided reality of the Jains is still one elephant; the blind men are partial, not equally right about everything. Kurosawa's witnesses disagree, but a crime did occur in one particular way. Our lenses are coloured, but the light that passes through them is not. That is precisely why human beings have built institutions to correct for colour. Science relies on peer review and replication so that a result must survive the scrutiny of rivals. Courts depend on evidence, cross-examination and appeal. A free press, the Right to Information Act of 2005 and independent statistical bodies such as the National Statistical Commission exist so that facts are not left to the mercy of any single interest.

Equally, the statement is a demand on individual character. To accept a truth that hurts one's own side requires courage and humility. Satyendra Dubey, an engineer with the National Highways Authority of India, reported corruption in the Golden Quadrilateral project and was murdered in 2003; his death prompted a government resolution on protecting informants in 2004 and, eventually, the Whistle Blowers Protection Act of 2014. Gandhi titled his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth, treating truth as something to be tested, even against his own beliefs. Speaking at Lausanne in 1931, he explained why he had reversed the familiar phrase "God is Truth" and summed up his search in three words.

Truth is God.

In the same spirit, Article 51A(h) of the Constitution asks every citizen to develop the scientific temper and the spirit of inquiry, which is simply the habit of letting evidence, not identity, decide what we believe.

For public life, the lesson is concrete. A civil servant must write the same file noting whichever party is in power, and a judge must apply the same law to the powerful and the poor. Data on jobs, health or prices must be published even when it is inconvenient, because a government that hides an uncomfortable number loses the trust it needs when it has good news to share. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu after the end of apartheid, showed that a divided nation could heal only by hearing the truth about atrocities from every side. Reconciliation built on selective truth would have been another form of apartheid.

The young lawyer thrown off the train at Pietermaritzburg could have answered injustice with a coloured truth of his own, one that hated the people who had humiliated him. He chose instead a truth that could be offered to his opponents as well, and that made it unanswerable. Truth is like sunlight: it falls on every face alike, even when we view it through tinted glass. If individuals cultivate the honesty to look past their own colours, and institutions keep the glass clean through evidence, scrutiny and accountability, then Satyameva Jayate will remain not a slogan carved in stone but a promise kept in daily life.