A historian, biographer, and a former member of the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of India’s parliament), Rajmohan Gandhi has sought throughout his life to develop and protect a democratic India which respects all its citizens and enables all to thrive.

During the 1975-77 Emergency in India, Himmat, the weekly founded and edited by Rajmohan Gandhi, was among a handful of Indian journals that opposed the suspension of democratic rights.
In 1990, he led India’s delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
Today he is troubled by what is happening to India’s democracy.
Active also in promoting dialogue and reconciliation, Rajmohan Gandhi played, in the late 1960s, a leading role in establishing, in the hill town of Panchgani (not very far from the city of Pune), the centre widely known as Asia Plateau, which is run by the global NGO, ‘Initiatives of Change’.
From the 1990s, Rajmohan has taught history and politics at universities in India and the U.S., mostly at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In December 2017, Gandhi served as president, Contemporary History, at the 78th session of the Indian History Congress, held in Kolkata.