The Global Gandhi: Essays in Comparative Political Philosophy 9781138630291, 9780429491320

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THE GLOBAL GANDHI

This book is a comparative study of Gandhi’s philosophy and analyzes his relevance to modern political thought. It traces the intellectual origins of Gandhi’s nonviolence as well as his engagement with Western thinkers – ancient as well as his contemporaries. The author discusses Gandhi’s exchanges with eminent thinkers like Tolstoy and Thoreau, and looks at his vision of pluralism, democracy, and violence through the lens of philosophers like Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Cornelius Castoriadis. Further, it explores Gandhi’s association with Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the Khilafat Movement. Finally, the book examines Gandhian thought in the light of his global followers like Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela. An invaluable resource for the contemporary mind, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, political thought, Gandhi studies, and philosophy. Ramin Jahanbegloo is an Iranian–Canadian philosopher. He is presently the Executive Director of the Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Nonviolence and Peace Studies and the Vice-Dean of the School of Law at Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India. He is the winner of the Peace Prize from the United Nations Association in Spain (2009) for his extensive academic works in promoting dialogue between cultures and his advocacy for nonviolence, and more recently the winner of the Josep Palau i Fabre International Essay Prize. Some of his most recent publications are Gadflies in the Public Space (2016), The Decline of Civilization (2017), Letters to a Young Philosopher (2017), and On Forgiveness and Revenge (2017).

Gandhi’s contribution to modern philosophy and thought is often overlooked because his insistence on truth and non-violence is seen primarily as a spiritual quest. Ramin Jahanbegloo has admirably corrected this by positioning Gandhi in the midst of some of the most prominent thinkers of our times. As a result we not only arrive at a more profound appreciation of how Gandhi impacted liberal democratic theory, but we also get, as a bonus, a fresh perspective on philosophers about whom we thought we had heard the final word. – Dipankar Gupta, former Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

THE GLOBAL GANDHI Essays in Comparative Political Philosophy

Ramin Jahanbegloo

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Ramin Jahanbegloo The right of Ramin Jahanbegloo to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-63029-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-49132-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To people everywhere who are convinced that nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to them in their struggle for freedom

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction: Gandhi and the otherness of the other

1

1

Gandhi and Thoreau: the duty to disobey

9

2

Gandhi and Tolstoy: desperate old men wandering like Oedipus at Colonus

17

Beyond violence: a comparative analysis of Hannah Arendt and Mahatma Gandhi

25

Two concepts of pluralism: a comparative study of Mahatma Gandhi and Isaiah Berlin

37

Gandhi and Castoriadis: self-government and autonomy

48

Gandhi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan: critique of religious fanaticism

56

7

Gandhi and the Khilafat

67

8

The Gandhian vision of democracy

80

Conclusion: Gandhi and the Global Satyagraha

94

3 4 5 6

Bibliography

111 vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Throughout the process of writing this book, many individuals have been an inspiration and a great help to me. In my Gandhian journey, I have found a friend and a pillar of support in Ashis Nandy. He has been there providing his heartfelt support and guidance at all times and has given me invaluable guidance, inspiration and suggestions in my quest for Gandhi. I also would like to express my gratitude to the generous help and friendship of my friends Rajagopal P. V. and Jill Carr-Harris. I also have great pleasure in acknowledging my gratitude to my colleagues and fellow scholars at Jamia Millia Islamia, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and O. P. Jindal Global University, Professors Mujib Rehman, Shail Mayaram, and Ramaswamy Sudarshan. I take pride in acknowledging the insightful guidance of Dr Raj Kumar, Vice Chancellor, O. P. Jindal Global University, for sparing his valuable time whenever I approached him and showing me the way ahead. I would also like to express my gratitude to my assistant and friend Shama Banoo Abbasi, who has been a great help in taking forward the Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Peace Studies at O. P. Jindal Global University. It would be inappropriate if I omit to mention the names of my dear friends Sachin Dhawan, Ruchira Gupta and Raj Rewal, who have, in their own ways, kept me going on my path to the making of this book. My acknowledgment would be incomplete without thanking the biggest source of my strength, my family. The blessings of my mother, Khoji Kia, and the love of my wife Azin Moalej and of course my prime source of life force, my daughter Afarin, who never let things get dull or boring.

viii

INTRODUCTION Gandhi and the otherness of the other

Gandhi is a historical figure who is rarely studied and analyzed from a comparative perspective. However, there have been some pioneering works in the field of comparative political philosophy dealing with the Gandhian thought. Among these, works by Fred Dallmayr and Anthony Parel are of a great importance to our understanding of Gandhi and his legacy in relation to other thinkers and doctrines. This volume, which gathers eight lectures on Gandhi and others presented in the past ten years around the world, has been thought, presented and put together in the same spirit. Most of the chapters of this book have aimed to analyze the Gandhian thought in a comparative perspective. Some of these thinkers, like Thoreau and Tolstoy, influenced Gandhi directly. Others like Arendt, Berlin and Castoriadis, never met or read him despite being his contemporaries. But this book also portrays and focuses on figures like Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who knew Gandhi closely and collaborated with him. This is also true for those Indian Muslims who participated in Khilafat Movement and with whom Gandhi had a difficult but interesting learning experience about Islam. Therefore, in all and for all, this book is not only about Gandhi but also about others. Some of those others, like Berlin, Arendt and Castoriadis, had a great impact on my life and thoughts. They were either my direct teachers and mentors (as Berlin and Castoriadis), or had an indirect influence on my political and theoretical mode of thinking (as Hannah Arendt). However, by analyzing Gandhi’s philosophy in a comparative perspective, I intend to develop and demonstrate two points: first, that Gandhi is a relevant political theorist and a necessary reading for students, professors and researchers in this domain; and second, to reveal clearly and distinctly the multi dimensional aspect of Gandhian thought. Therefore, in all these chapters, I have been involved in the 1

INTRODUCTION

complexity of Gandhian thought, by trying to read, compare, analyze and evaluate the most significant problems and categories in Gandhi’s philosophy. This is an open-ended dynamic shaped, not only by an effort to eliminate most of the theoretical obstacles which exist to understanding of the Gandhian theory of nonviolence and disobedience, but also by a critical, not to say radical, approach which provides a sharp contrast between Gandhian approach to ethics, spirituality, pluralism and interculturality and many aspects of our contemporary world, including lack of empathy and tolerance, legitimized violence, inequality and exclusion, and finally passivity and mediocrity. In other words, this volume invites the reader to a Gandhian philosophical perspective that involves a dialogical and hermeneutic approach to self-reflective and self-transformative commitment in making of an autonomous society beyond the political atomism and hedonistic individualism of our time. This methodological claim is a theoretical attempt to revitalize and reformulate Gandhi’s philosophical approach for our contemporary world, while applying much of his empathic synergy and positive alternatives to our decivilizing society. It is this sense of philosophical urgency and ethical agency that provides a way where the Gandhian outspokenness (parrhesia), its fearlessness and its transformative dynamic can stand against many dogmatic, positivistic and one-dimensional expressions of politics, techno-science and religion in our world. As a moral idealist, Gandhi’s emphasis on the role of ethics in politics goes hand in hand with his holistic and integrative philosophy of life. As such, he applies his experiments with truth not only at an individual level but also in the process of thinking political action and global affairs. In Gandhi’s model of national and international politics, truth (satya) and nonviolence (ahimsa) are brought into a mutually interacting and reinforcing relation. Therefore, as in the case of means and ends, truth and nonviolence are interchangeable entities. Moreover, according to Gandhi, nonviolence is a means for actualizing the truth. As a result, politics for Gandhi is a matter of nonviolent organization of the society with the aim of becoming more mature and more truthful. At the same time, Gandhi is always concerned with cooperation among nations in terms of mutual understanding, empathic friendship and nonviolent partnership. Therefore, the main question for Gandhi is to know whether world cultures and diverse religious traditions would engage in a dialogue with each other. This is a hard question with which Gandhi wrestled in his time, while trying to find an answer for it through his own life experience. 2

INTRODUCTION

As such, what the comparative analysis of the Gandhian thought reveals to us is that, unlike many contemporary liberal political thinkers who put rights before duties and responsibilities, empathy and cross-cultural understanding are the hallmarks of a Gandhian view of everyday politics. The heart of Gandhi’s ethics of empathy is to look within oneself, change oneself and then change the world. That is to say, at a more fundamental level, for Gandhi, cultures and nations are not isolated entities, because they all play a special role in the making of human history. Therefore, Gandhi rarely speaks in terms of linear world history. His goal for every culture (including his own) is the same as his goal for every individual: to find the truth. This is a way to open up the world to a harmonic exchange and a transformative dialogue among nations. Therefore, at a more philosophical level, in Gandhi’s view, every culture should learn from others. The comparative approach remains, therefore, at the heart of the Gandhian political philosophy. Such a dialogical and comparative attitude conducted by Gandhi at the deepest level and in a spirit of genuine reciprocity and solidarity is not only just a moral requirement, but also a geopolitical necessity. Gandhi’s conception of “enlarged pluralism” takes on the task of fostering togetherness and solidarity among cultures and traditions in the interest of democratizing modernity and bringing about a more just global order. One reason why Gandhi is able to do this is that he has political and cultural pluralism in his bones and he never makes the mistake of rejecting or underestimating other traditions of thought in his approach to truth and in his stress on nonviolence. Although Gandhi’s thought has a strong Hindu core and contains elements that sit ill at ease with other cultures and religious traditions, he insists that everybody has a right to interpret and revise his tradition of thought and that the spiritual quest of each individual goes beyond a simple sense of belonging to a community. That is why Gandhi affirms: “There is in Hinduism room enough for Jesus as there is for Mohammed, Zoroaster and Moses. . . . For me, different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden, or they are branches of the same majestic tree.”1 Gandhi rejects the idea that there was one privileged path to God. Second, he believes that all religious traditions are an unstable mixture of truth and error. Third, he encourages inter-religious dialogue, so that individuals could see their faith in a comparative and critical reflection of the other. For example, the sacred texts of all religions have contradictory trends and impulses: sanctioning one thing, but also its opposite. Gandhi, however, invites 3

INTRODUCTION

individuals to reject those trends that assert violence and discrimination while promoting justice and nonviolence. For him a culture or a religious tradition that denies individual freedom in the name of unity or purity is coercive and unacceptable. One immediate example which comes to mind, and finds its deep relevance in the context of today’s world, is when some women were stoned to death in Afghanistan for allegedly committing adultery and Gandhi criticized the act by underlining that “this particular form of penalty cannot be defended on the ground of its mere mention in the Koran.” He added, “every formula of every religion has in this age of reason to submit to the acid test of reason and universal justice if it is to ask for universal assent.”2 This is where we can see how the function of critical rationality (the “acid test of reason”) is applied by Gandhi to his hermeneutic approach of religions and to the spirit of dialogue among cultures. This explains why Gandhi breaks up with the tradition of “civilizational” discourse developed by his predecessors on the right and on the left of the political spectrum. As Bikhu Parekh points out admirably, “Unlike his predecessors, Gandhi’s explanation and critique of colonial rule was essentially cultural . . . (because) unlike his predecessors, Gandhi insisted that the colonial encounter was not between Indian and European but ancient and modern civilizations.”3 Gandhi neither refused to examine and borrow critically European values and practices of dissent, nor was he convinced and frustrated by what many Indians considered as the “superiority” of Western civilization. Since Indians were constantly challenged through colonial domination by the cultural dilemma of take and give, their self-esteem came to be integrally tied up with what was worth preserving in their civilization. Gandhi’s cultural task, therefore, was as difficult as his political one. He had to show the practicality and relevance of Indian culture while being critical to its unjust, unwise and impractical aspects. Furthermore, he had to help his countrymen to regain their violated self-esteem by renewing an indigenous system of knowledge and practicality which was marginalized and labeled unscientific and culturally backward by British colonialism. But he also had to devise alternative ways of seeing Indian culture and being Indian by privileging a comparative culture of criticism. The Gandhian dialogical and comparative approach resides in Gandhi’s inclusivist and empathic vision of humanity which is devoid of any sense of polarization between “us” and “them”. For this reason,

4

INTRODUCTION

Gandhi attaches the utmost importance to heterogeneous components in the micro-communities. According to Gandhi communities need to be molded on their ability to see themselves in others and others in themselves. Gandhi considers such a policy as essential because the aim for him is to avoid the danger of cultural conformity and to move towards a genuine ensemble of cultures based on mutual exchanges and creative synthesis. Gandhi considers this as a call for simultaneous awareness of commonalities, acceptance of differences and recognition of shared values. As such, Gandhi is a thinker and a practitioner who is constantly experimenting with modes of comparative and cross-border cultural constellations. As he affirms, “I do not want my house to be walled in on sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.”4 This statement of Gandhi has a particular relevance to the cultural situation in our globalized world. Gandhi’s “house” can be understood as a metaphor for an autonomous and democratically self-organized system within a decentralized community of “houses” where communication between equally respected and equally valid cultures can take place. In other words, this capacity to engage constructively with conflicting values is an essential component of practical wisdom and empathic pluralism of Gandhian nonviolence. What appears here as a reformed liberal approach of Gandhi is actually his vision of integral democracy based on self-rule, self-discipline and self-transformation. As such, Gandhi is an inter-cultural and constructive thinker of democracy, drawing on strengths from his theory of nonviolence and autonomy. Here, Gandhi’s concept of pluralism is opposed to all forms of relativism, since it is based on a belief in a basic universal human nature beneath the widely diverse forms that human life and belief take across cultures. It also involves a belief in the fact that understanding of moral views is possible among all people of all cultures because they all participate in the same quest for Truth. This why Gandhi affirms, “Temples or mosques or churches. . . . I make no distinction between these different abodes of God. They are what faith has made them. They are an answer to man’s craving somehow to reach the Unseen.”5 Last but not least, the Gandhian nonviolent approach to plurality is a way of bridging differences and developing inter-cultural awareness and understanding among individuals and nations. As a result, Gandhi suggests a view of civilization deeply rooted in an ethics of nonviolence. However, his ontological and political demands for an ethical

5

INTRODUCTION

approach to human affairs are not of a utopian nature, but more of a dialogical sensibility. Maybe that is why Gandhi’s response to the phenomenology of violence is not the exclusion of certain historical self-consciousness but a mutual recognition among subjects of history. As a matter of fact, the pluralistic and inter-cultural recognition in the Gandhian vision of democracy can determine our sense of who we are and the value accorded to the common world we live in. In other words, for Gandhi, one’s sense of freedom is never a matter of simple self-introspection. Rather, understanding oneself as an autonomous self-consciousness requires the recognition of the otherness of the other. For Gandhi, recognition is the mechanism by which our democratic existence, as self-transformative beings, is generated. Therefore, our successful integration as ethical and political subjects within a particular or universal res publica is dependent upon forms of mutual recognition of each other’s otherness. Gandhi is, therefore, of the opinion that those civilizations and cultures that are blinded by deep-seated prejudice and hatred of the “other” would fail to see the harmonizing threads that bind humanity. For him, the many shared concerns and values which are always at work in each culture are all one for all mankind. Constant interaction among civilizations, therefore, could enable them to weave strands of diversity into mosaic of a global civilization. Today, in a world where mankind is confronted with the grim scenario of clashes of national and religious self-interests rooted in ethnic and racial prejudice, Gandhi and his view of the otherness of the other can reinforce the spiritual values of civilization and contribute to the respect for diversity and pluralism, values of peace and democracy, and a sense of human solidarity. In truth, Gandhi’s plurality of others is not only a virtue-enhancing dynamic but also an ethical and ontological effort which fosters, cultivates and engages reflective, critical and empathic citizenry – a citizenry that, among other things, has an accurate sense of political responsibility and social solidarity and possesses the critical capacity to distinguish between the “pragmatic” and the “ethical” in politics. Those who want to remain “pragmatically” truthful to the ethical in the art of organizing the society have their task cut out for them by Gandhi and his approach to the otherness of the others. The point here is that in Gandhi’s political philosophy the experience of freedom derives from the diverse modes of participation in common concerns and community – engendering values spelled out in terms of a dialogue with the otherness of the other. Actually, Gandhi’s

6

INTRODUCTION

message would be that dialogue with the other would save the self from its own tyranny. In short, what all this means is that, with Gandhi, human conscience finally returns to earth, to the here and now, after centuries of temptation looking for salvation in eschatological constructions. As such, Gandhi’s idea of an alternative model of cosmopolitan interaction, inspired in part by linking the art of dialogue with nonviolent inter-human friendship, has been very helpful for the success of his non-imitative dialogical exchange with the modern civilization. It is as a result of this dialogical stance that Gandhi suggests the historical necessity of nonviolence as a form of “soft” universalism which provides us with a theoretical and practical framework for various possible versions of moral life without being founded in a fixed idea of the self. In other words, Gandhian nonviolence provides us with a universalistic criterion by which we can scrutinize the principles of action that we might seek as basic to our lives, actions and institutions. The dialogical content of nonviolence does not force us to choose, but offers us reasons and arguments for adapting moral principles which take into consideration the otherness of the other. In other words, Gandhian nonviolence applies the universal right to reciprocity in a world of plural values in order to allow people with different values to accept one another. Gandhi, therefore, stands in the history of India and the world as a detractor of all forms of universalistic attitude which are in search of uniformity and homogenization. The challenge here for Gandhi is to focus on the process of democratic consciousness-building, which can provide continuity to the political structures of democracy by way of contrast with all forms of authoritarian tradition. This is where Gandhi’s own non-imitative and dialogical thinking comes to his aid as a grammar of resistance to the tyranny of tradition. Though he finds himself at home in his Indian traditions, he knows how to keep himself alert in order to be able to distinguish between a false sense of belonging and respect for a common space where the plurality of voices can be realized. Gandhi knew well that one cannot be a friend of truth without living on the edge. For him, therefore, thinking and living became one. But, thanks to his comparative and dialogical attitude, he always thought differently and lived marginally. His opening up to the world went hand in hand with his act of being free. While listening to his inner voice, he also had an acute sense of the world. Gandhi preferred to walk with the others, even on a tightrope, rather than walking alone on a rigid, inflexible and impenetrable ground.

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INTRODUCTION

Notes 1 Harijan, 30 January 1937. 2 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Collective Works, 21, p. 246. 3 Parekh, Bikhu, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse, London: Sage Publications, 1989, pp. 71–72. 4 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Young India, 1 June 1921. 5 Quoted in Kripalani, Krishna (ed.), All Men Are Brothers, Paris: UNESCO, 1969, p. 62.

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1 GANDHI AND THOREAU The duty to disobey

In July 1846, Henry David Thoreau was taken to the local jail in a small town in Massachusetts on a charge of not having paid his taxes. Thoreau’s imprisonment led him to write his famous essay published in 1849 under the title of Resistance to Civil Government, later known as On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Sixty years later after this publication, during his second prison term in October–December 1908, Mohandas K. Gandhi read and paraphrased Thoreau’s famous essay. As Anthony Parel underlines in his illuminating introduction to Hind Swaraj, Gandhi was heartened to read that conscience, not majorities, should have the ultimate say in judging what is politically right and wrong, that while it is not one’s duty to eradicate evil, it is certainly one’s first duty not to give support to it, that even one person’s action counts although the multitude may be opposed to it, that in an unjust political regime the prison is the right place for the just person, that only the state is worthy of obedience which recognizes the just individual as a higher and independent power from which the state’s own power is ultimately derived.1 Actually, Thoreau’s argument was that every individual should follow higher laws and principles against all unjust laws. As such, Thoreau invites all individuals to govern their own actions by referring to the principle of justice rather than by justifying them through the principle of legality. However, Thoreau’s rebellious individualism and dissenting disobedience should be differentiated from any form of revolutionary anarchism of a Bakunin or Kropotkin. The essence of Thoreau’s “disobedience”, which he distinguishes from mere lawlessness: 9

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is contained in the word civil – a word of many and varied connotations. First of all, civil is an adjective relating to the responsibilities of the citizen, and the whole justification for Civil Disobedience lies in the idea that the man who practices it fulfills his responsibilities by demonstrating in action his disapproval of an evil law or social situation which ordinary democratic procedures will not eliminate.2 In other words, from Thoreau’s point of view the inner sense of the moral law invokes the idea of responsibility against the idea of obedience. This simply means that the individual should stand alone against the State. Thoreau argues the following in his essay: When I converse with the freest of my neighbours, I perceive that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness of the question, and their regard for the public tranquility, the long and short of the matter is, that they cannot spare the protection of the existing government, and they dread the consequences of disobedience to it to their property and families. For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. But, if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill, I will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly and at the same time comfortably in outward respects.3 So what Thoreau is suggesting is that the only way to transform a society is to transform oneself. Underpinning both aspects, making them one structure, was Thoreau’s bedrock radicalism. It was this that gave his essay on “Civil Disobedience” its spirit. It is not strategies, after all, that keep his words alive, it is the Prometheus in them, Shelly’s Prometheus, who will never make peace with an overlord.4 We must remember that Thoreau went to jail to protest against the institution of slavery, but also as a way to reaffirm his defiant individualism in face of social wrong. That is why, he calls upon all honest men to do what he has done and to refuse active or even symbolical support to the state which 10

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countenances the nefarious institution of slavery. He excoriates those who think that they have done their duty when they have merely voted right and who then take refuge in that kind of good citizenship which consists in bowing to the will of the majority.5 Thoreau, thus, asserts the right of conscience as a form of nonviolent civil resistance against the State. As a transcendentalist, Thoreau was convinced that living simple and fighting against economic royalism was a badge of honor. Rebelling against acquisition, he was happy in the gift to him by the gods of years without an encumbrance. He was willing to live so Spartan-like as to put to flight all that was not life. He journeyed to Walden Pond not, as some may think, to flee from life but in the midst of this apparent privation to find it.6 Perhaps Gandhi’s condemnation of modern civilization and his acceptance of simplicity as a life principle were partly influenced by Henry David Thoreau. But Gandhi positioned himself on the higher grounds of moral and political leadership by suggesting crucial means such as swaraj (self-government), Satyagraha (truth force) and Sarvodaya (Welfare of All) to get there. Gandhi’s disobedience, like that of Thoreau, was civil and active, but it entailed the spiritual search for truth and the art of suffering. Where Thoreau acted more as an eco-philosopher, Gandhi appeared as a moral leader of Indians and a political strategist. Recognizing the theoretical significance of Henry David Thoreau for his Satyagraha, Gandhi named Thoreau as one of the five thinkers who had an impact on his life and suggested the reading of “The Duty of Civil Disobedience” to his companions. As Parel points out, Four ideas from this essay greatly impressed Gandhi. The first concerns the moral foundation of government and the state. To be strictly just, government must have the sanction of the governed. The second idea concerns the relationship of the individual to the state. In some respects, the individual is subject to the power of the state, but in some other respects, he or she is independent of it. Gandhi agreed with Thoreau that there would never be a truly free and enlightened state until the state recognized the individual as the higher and independent 11

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power from which all of its own power and authority are derived and treated him or her accordingly. . . . . The third idea concerned the need to limit government’s power over the citizen. “That government is best which governs least” is the famous motto of Thoreau that Gandhi adopted as his own. . . . The fourth idea was that the duty to disobey an unjust law requires prompt, concrete action. . . . Thoreau’s famous dictum that under a government that imprisons any person unjustly, “the true place for a just man is also a prison”, went straight to Gandhi’s heart.7 Moreover, Gandhi was already a serious practitioner of civil disobedience when he discovered Thoreau’s famous essay in a South African prison. Therefore, he readily endorsed the Thoreauvian idea that citizens come before the State and disobeying unjust laws is for the sake of justice and not power change. Also, Gandhi considered Thoreau, as in the case of Socrates and Tolstoy, as a true Satyagrahi who believed in a life of virtue and excellence rather than a life of leisure and material possession. He writes: Thoreau in his immortal essay shows that civil disobedience, not violence is the true remedy. In civil disobedience, the resister suffers the consequences of disobedience. This was what Daniel did when he disobeyed the law of the Medes and the Persians. That is what John Bunyan did and that what raiyats [peasants] have done in India from time immemorial. It is the law of our being. Violence is the law of the beast in us. Self-suffering, i.e. civil resistance, is the law of man in us. It is rarely that the occasion for civil resistance arises in a wellordered State.”8 As such, unlike Thoreau, Gandhi’s underlying commitments to truth and nonviolence are found in his spiritual idea of self-suffering. For Gandhi, the secret of self-suffering lies in maintaining the right balance between self-discipline and ethical demands. Hence, Gandhi is a thinker and practitioner who is in search of the guidance of the voice of Truth speaking from within. That is why his concept of civil disobedience is deeply spiritual. As for Thoreau, there is a constant reference in his writings to the idea of a “higher light within”. According to Thoreau: “It is by obeying the suggestions of a higher light within you that you escape from yourself and . . . travel totally new paths.”9 It is 12

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this mystical approach that can lead us to find some significant ethical similarities between Thoreau and Gandhi. However, there is a limit to the need for virtue in Thoreau’s philosophy. Though Gandhi is impressed by Thoreau’s earnestness, he does not consider him as a model of chastity. Gandhi himself sought to bring clarity to the idea of “chastity” through his discussion of purushartha. “Our only right is to purushartha,” writes Gandhi: We can only strive and work. All human beings, animals too, struggle. The only difference is that we believe that behind our struggle there is an intelligent purpose. That purpose seeks much more than bodily material well-being; it seeks moral and spiritual well-being as well. We seek to transcend our mere bodily condition; we strive even to surpass ourselves. We can achieve all this if we pursue our purushartha.10 As in the case of Gandhi, Thoreau may also be considered as a spiritual thinker in quest of self-reform and reform of the society. Yet, Thoreau was very different from his transcendentalist fellows. As Joel Porte explains, “For both Whitman and Thoreau, Transcendentalism was a Saturnalia of sense experience. Unlike Emerson, who stood in awe before the ‘mighty and transcendent Soul’, Thoreau trembled before the mystery of matter, of sheer physical existence.”11 Surprisingly, Thoreau did not believe in humankind’s divine destiny and espousing higher moral principles did not necessarily mean for him to follow divine laws. He writes the following passage in his Journal for 1840: The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky. If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer. To see from earth to heaven, and see there standing, still a fixture, that old Jewish scheme! What right have you to hold up this obstacle to my understanding you, to your understanding me! You did not invent it; it was imposed on you. Examine your authority . . . Your scheme must be the framework of the universe, all other schemes will soon be ruins.12 It goes, therefore, without saying that for Thoreau the search for the spiritual is a lonely occupation. His poetic perception of reality goes 13

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hand in hand with his motivation to experience beauty. According to Walter Harding, “As he strove for simplicity and economy in his life, he strove for simplicity and economy in his art. . . . He was able to appreciate the beauty of the functional approach.”13 Thoreau, therefore, was a bundle of diverse, different and contradictory things. As a result, aside from the resemblances between Gandhi and Thoreau, there are many differences. For example, there are serious gaps in Thoreau’s actions as a social reformer. Unlike Gandhi, Thoreau had no talent for mass leadership. He was more of a lonely thinker and writer. According to Norman Foerster: Channing thought that Thoreau’s taste in English literature was “very exquisite”. With some exceptions it assuredly was. . . . What he absorbed unconsciously from his Transcendental environment, he supplemented through the books that chance – and Emerson – brought to him, freely inviting influence. It was one of his first principles that we should act out what we have read – should not let the feeling or thought lie passive and then languish, but rise and act. What he read, Thoreau became.14 Yet, despite all his idiosyncrasies, Thoreau was not an extreme individualist. He fully realized that certain functions could best be conducted by society rather than by the individual. . . . [But] far more important to Thoreau than government was liberty. That government he would respect that not only frees man from civil restraint but also fosters and encourages a true moral freedom.15 There are two dimensions to the idea of freedom in Thoreau’s life and writings. As Thoreau’s famous book Walden and Civil Disobedience shows, he believed that freedom can only be attained in retreat from the society. But in his social and political writings, such as On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, Thoreau is less inclined toward “wildness” and believes equally in the reform of individuals through the reform of the society. However, in the Gandhian corpus, there is no real place for the education of freedom in nature. Though a dedicated ecologist, Gandhi believes seriously in the constructive work of citizens in the society. Thus, individualist protest or retreat, in the manner of Thoreau, is not 14

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the whole of nonviolent politics for Gandhi. As Gandhi says, “Satyagraha is for rare occasions and for the few, while the constructive program is for always and to be carried out by everyone.”16 In other words, though very different, both Thoreau and Gandhi contributed immensely to the theory of civil disobedience in modern times. Accordingly, their contributions should not be evaluated only in terms of political action but also in terms of political education of citizens. Developing Thoreau’s theory of disobedience of unjust laws, Gandhi led the Indians to their independence. As for Thoreau, he represents a great representative of American individualist rebelliousness, which we too often forget. As George Woodcock notes: We tend to forget above all that the United States was born in disobedience, and that the old dissenting tradition which made the Pilgrim Fathers withdraw themselves from religious persecution in England has left a heritage both of distrust for blind obedience and of respect for the workings of the individual conscience which is still a great deal more alive than the official mask of modern America may lead us to assume.17 Basically, Thoreau’s life and struggle is the story of an American rebellious soul. Hundred years later, Martin Luther King Jr became the spokesman of this soul. It was King Jr who took Thoreau’s message of civil disobedience to the Capitol, but undoubtedly his most important contribution was to find a harmony between the Thoreauvian heritage of defiant individualism and Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent struggle for justice.

Acknowledgment This chapter is a revised version of the lecture “The Gandhi and Thoreau: The Duty to Disobey”, delivered at the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, January 2013.

Notes 1 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Hind Swaraj, edited by Anthony J. Parel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. XLVI. 2 Woodcock, George, Civil Disobedience, Toronto: CBC Publications, 1966, p. 3. 3 Thoreau, Henry David, Walden and Civil Disobedience, edited by Owen Thomas, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1966, pp. 234–235.

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4 Stoller, Leo, “Civil Disobedience: Principle and Politics”, in Hicks, John H. (ed.), Thoreau in Our Season, Cambridge, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1962, p. 41. 5 Krutch, Joseph Wood, Henry David Thoreau, New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1948, p. 134. 6 Nelson, William Stuart, “Thoreau and American Non-Violent Resistance”, in Thoreau in Our Season, op. cit., p. 17. 7 Parel, Anthony J., Pax Gandhiana: The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 191–193. 8 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1960–1994: Vol. 16, p. 51. 9 Thoreau, Henry David, Journal, Vl. IX, p. 38 in Harding, Walter, A Thoreau Handbook, New York: New York University Press, 1959, p. 135. 10 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, op. cit., Vol. 32, pp. 350–351. 11 Porte, Joel, Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1966, p. 129. 12 Quoted in Frederick Garber, Thoreau's fable of inscribing, Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1991, p.77 13 Harding, Walter, A Thoreau Handbook, New York: New York University Press, 1959, p. 157. 14 Foerster, Norman, The Intellectual Heritage of Thoreau, The Arden Library, 1978, pp. 15, 21. 15 Harding, Walter, A Thoreau Handbook, op. cit., pp. 146–147. 16 Parel, Anthony J., Pax Gandhiana, op. cit., p. 201. 17 Woodcock, George, Civil Disobedience, op. cit., p. 61.

16

2 GANDHI AND TOLSTOY Desperate old men wandering like Oedipus at Colonus

Until the early twentieth century it was custom among the elites and ordinary people around the world to think of civilization in terms of ever-increasing knowledge of science and technology. However, there were a few thinkers, like Tolstoy and Gandhi, who believed that mankind had to move to a new definition of civilization considered as the moral progress of humanity, based on the law of love rather than law of violence. In 1909 after a visit to London, Gandhi wrote an article in his journal, The Indian Opinion, entitled “This Crazy Civilization”. “London has gone mad over Mr. Bleriot [the pioneer aviator],” wrote Gandhi. We have trains running underground; there are telegraphic wires already hanging over us; and outside, on the roads, there is the deafening noise of trains. If you now have planes flying in the air, take it that people will be done to death. Looking at this land, I at any rate have grown disillusioned with Western civilization.1 It was on his visit to London that Gandhi bought and read with full enthusiasm Tolstoy’s “Letter to a Hindu”. The letter was addressed to an Indian revolutionary and an editor of a magazine called Free Hindustan, by the name of Taraknath Das, who was an exile living in Vancouver, Canada. Das was a follower of the British psychologist, Herbert Spencer and a critic of nonviolence as a mode of struggle against the British. He had sent two copies of his magazine and asked for an article, but protested to Tolstoy that nonviolence was self-defeating and contradicted altruism as well as egotism. Tolstoy sat 17

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down to write a reply on June 7, the day he got Das’s letter, but it took him 413 manuscript pages and six months before he completed it, having discarded twenty-eight tentative versions.2 In his response to Das, Tolstoy insisted on the fact that the Indians should replace the law of violence by the law of love, because “love is the only way to rescue humanity from all illness and in it you too have the only method of saving your people from enslavement.”3 Only thus could Indians free themselves from the British, for “they themselves live and have lived by violence.”4 Therefore, according to Tolstoy, the Indians should liberate themselves from being “stupefied by religious and scientific superstitions”, while trying to understand “the truth that for our life one law is valid – the law of love, which brings the highest happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind.”5 As history goes Das was totally unimpressed by Tolstoy’s letter-essay, but it was Gandhi who read it and decided to write a response to the author. It is from this moment onward that Mohandas K. Gandhi became Mahatma Gandhi, a new moral leader for a new India. Gandhi wrote his first letter to Tolstoy on 1 October 1909, asking the latter if he could reprint the “Letter to a Hindu” as a separate pamphlet. After a short undated response of Tolstoy (probably March 1910), Gandhi wrote back to him and gave some details of his work in South Africa. On 4 April 1910, Gandhi sent to Tolstoy a copy of his book Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule). Hind Swaraj was written between 11 and 18 December 1909 while Gandhi was returning on a ship to South Africa. Having read Hind Swaraj, Tolstoy wrote a long letter to Gandhi, dated 7 September 1910. “The longer I live”, wrote Tolstoy, especially when I clearly feel the approach of death – the more I feel moved to express. What I feel more strongly than anything else, and what in my opinion is of immense importance, namely, what we call the renunciation of all opposition by force, which really simply means the doctrine of the law of love unperverted by sophistries.6 Tolstoy certainly was aware of the fact that his letter would satisfy Gandhi, but he could not measure the level of influence his doctrine of Christian love would have on this letter. For Tolstoy, love was defined as the effort of human’s soul towards empathy and solidarity. He 18

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described love as “the highest and indeed the only law of life”.7 We can understand herewith an example of Tolstoy’s mystical morality. Moreover, central to Tolstoy’s doctrine of nonviolence is the idea of “the change of heart”. According to Tolstoy, “the nonviolent man must be in control of his emotions, he must be able to dominate his desires, and to do this he must, in fact, gain spiritual or moral power over his physical or sentient self.”8 For Tolstoy, it was clear that neither the society nor the individual could live without a moral vision of the world. As Isaiah Berlin mentions in his essay on “Tolstoy and Enlightenment”: Truth for Tolstoy, is always discoverable, to follow it is to be good, inwardly sound, harmonious. Yet it is clear that our society is not harmonious or composed of internally harmonious individuals. The interests of the educated minority – what he calls, ‘the professors, the barons and the bankers’ – are opposed to those of the majority-the peasants, the poor. . . . Can it be that civilized men have acquired (or discovered) certain true values of their own, which barbarians and children may know nothing of, but which they-the civilized- cannot lose or forget, even if, by some impossible means, they transform themselves into peasants or the free and happy Cossacks of the Don and the Terek? This is one of the central and most tormenting problems in Tolstoy’s life, to which he goes back again and again, and to which he returns conflicting answers.9 What Tolstoy preached was in effect that life values triumph over concepts such as patriotism, organized religion, political alliances and wars. Tolstoy described this majestically in his masterpiece War and Peace. He writes, “the self-important plans of generals and emperors (most notably Napoleon) are in fact ineffective epiphenomenon upon the surface of events, and the latter move according to deep-lying laws of their own which cannot be known.”10 Few writers, such as Tolstoy, particularly in the nineteenth century, have been so much aware of the tempo of individual destinies of ordinary characters in the midst of historical changes. But “the world Tolstoy sees and depicts is to an increasing degree a world in which decent people can no longer find any opportunity for action. . . . It is true that Tolstoy also preached the need for good deeds, for individual nonparticipation in sin and the like.”11 Nevertheless, what Tolstoy had in 19

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mind was the idea of universal happiness based on the brotherhood of men. However, he knew well that such happiness would not be possible as long as men could not resist evil. In his old age, he went back to this idea and affirmed: The ideal of brotherhood, including all human beings under the vault of heaven has always remained with me, and just as I believed then that there is a little green stick with the words on it to destroy all evil in men and bring them great blessings, so I believe today that truth exists, that it will be disclosed to men, and give them what it promises.12 Accordingly, it is as a follower of this truth and as a resistant against this evil, that Tolstoy projects himself as a central character in all his writings. He is both Pierre in War and Peace and Levin in Anna Karenina. Also: in personal relations Tolstoy perceived quite clearly that an individual’s unpleasant qualities productive of evil consequences to himself and others were always associated with the will to power, domination or self-aggrandisement; and that these qualities were evil because they could only be exercised and fulfilled at the expense of some weaker person or persons. He also saw the good qualities were the negation of these, namely, patience, humility, suffering rather than resisting power, equality, concern for others, compassion, love, selfsacrifice.13 In conclusion, we can say that Tolstoy’s moral vision of mankind is that love of power and desire of domination create evil. As a result, Tolstoy’s central subject of concern is the response of human spirituality to the problem of power. Tolstoy’s answer to this question is that “life is the sign of the good.” As Lev Shestov underlines in his book Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche: what interest us here is not what Tolstoy says to himself. It is not the formal “proofs” of his ideas that are important to us, but rather the source from which flowed his preaching, his ferocious hatred for the educated classes, for art, for science. I repeat: it is neither faith nor Christianity that led Tolstoy to his negative attitude; he does not say a word about faith in all 20

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his works. God is deliberately replaced by the “good”, and the “good” by fraternal love among men.14 Behind the Tolstoyan idea of “fraternal love among men” lay an ideal of primitive Christian village communities. Tolstoy and his many disciples tried to put that vision into practice in defiance of the Tsarist autocracy. . . . As Tolstoy did, they went to live like peasants, and engaged in rural education, in famine relief, in work among the city poor. Everything they did was intended as an act of reproach against the most tyrannical government which the world then knew. . . . But, through the martyrdom of the Tolstoyans heightened the disgust of early twentieth century Russians with the rule of the Tsar, it did not win then the support of the masses, and so the two great Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were violent when they came, and, as Tolstoy had prophesied, their final effect was to replace one despotism with another. . . . But in spite of what seemed like a tragic failure of all his attempts at action, Tolstoy’s theory remained, a doctrine of ethical Christianity in which the idea of Civil Disobedience was worked out as an integral part of a religious life, and as such it was to be used with a success beyond anything Tolstoy hoped for by his greatest disciple, Gandhi.15 What Gandhi retained from his reading of Tolstoy’s writings were three points. First, a criticism of modern Western civilization. Second, the idea of universal love. Third and last, the ideal of brotherhood of Man, exemplified by his ideal of a society of village communities. As a matter of fact, Gandhi named his ashram in South Africa after Tolstoy and described its aim as to “to implant the spirit of Tolstoy, and then a knowledge of country life, and of the way to make the best use of it”.16 As for Tolstoy’s concept of Christian love, it had a lasting impact on Gandhi through his readings of Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You. Tolstoy’s pamphlet changed Gandhi’s total view of the relation between religion and ethics. In this work Tolstoy presents Christianity, not as a dogmatic, revealed religion, but as an ethical system. At the heart of its teaching is the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount, which according to Tolstoy, teaches the doctrine of nonviolence and 21

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the ultimacy of the conscience. . . . Tolstoy thought that he had found in the New Testament an answer to at least one question – the question of violence in the world, namely how to settle the conflict between people who now consider a thing evil that others consider good, and vice versa – and a workable solution for it. . . . It can and will be bettered, contends Tolstoy, if both internal and external changes occur, when humans learn to listen to their true Christian conscience in which alone is revealed the Kingdom of God, which is kingdom of love and nonviolence.17 For Gandhi, the highest religion was Truth. He, therefore, presented his life as a search for and experiment with Truth. Following Tolstoy: he believed passionately that God was to be found amongst the poor, and that service of all humanity and particularly the poor was the only way to personal salvation, Moksha, or deliverance from self-bondage into the realization of one’s true self in the service of Truth.18 As a result, Gandhi’s socio-economic ideas had clearly normative principles encompassing ethics as its philosophical foundation. “Gandhi’s insistence on nonviolence and his belief in the interconnectedness of life meant that it is our duty to protect the weak. Gandhi called his recommended method of working toward this ideal ‘trusteeship’.”19 The Gandhian concept of “trusteeship” was very close to Tolstoy’s idea of self-dispossession of property. For Gandhi, in the idea of trusteeship, the rich man should realize that his right to an honorable livelihood is no better than the economic lives of the others. As a result, Gandhi’s doctrine of trusteeship is “a major contribution to the idea of the reconstruction of a new society . . . The important point is that Gandhi wanted to change the values that govern the economic activities in the society without external interference.”20 Significantly, like Tolstoy, Gandhi considered the village as the basic unit of economic reconstruction and political democratization. For him, decentralized politics and egalitarian economy were essentially related to a rural society where the Tolstoyan law of love operates in relations of reciprocity and mutuality. Gandhi also took into consideration some other social and economic factors such as bread labor, swadeshi, minimization of wants and mutual cooperation. Altogether Gandhi believed, like Tolstoy, that in a nonviolent polity, a pyramid of power did not 22

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exist and life would be like an oceanic circle, “whose outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle, but will give strength to all within and derive its own strength from it”.21 Therefore, both Gandhi and Tolstoy believed that the State did not represent any moral authority and, therefore, its role was to be reduced to a minimum or to disappear once for all. Today many around the world consider this idea as impractical, not to say utopian. However, Gandhian ethics of social and political reconstruction is more relevant than ever, since it represents an act of self-transformation of humanity rather than an immature dream of an Indian political leader. As for Tolstoy, the late Sir Isaiah Berlin considered him both as a fox, who knows many things, and a hedgehog, who knows one big thing. He noted that: Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog, that his gifts and achievements are one thing, and his beliefs, and consequently his interpretation of his own achievement, another, and that consequently his ideals have led him, and those whom his genius for persuasion has taken in, into a systematic misinterpretation of what he and others were doing or should be doing.22 As similar, but also different, as Gandhi and Tolstoy were, they were united in their moral and political dreams of changing humanity. As dreamers, who looked for a harmonious universe, they were hedgehogs, but as practical pragmatists, who had a devastating sense of reality, they were foxes who knew many things about the insane world of human beings filled with hatred, revenge, greed for power and violence. They were, therefore, two old men, who both wandered “beyond human aid” like Oedipus at Colonus and died in despair.

Notes 1 Quoted in Gandhi. M.K., Soul Force: Gandhi's Writings on Peace, Tara Books, 2004, p. 82. 2 Green, Martin, Tolstoy and Gandhi, Men of Peace: A Biography, New York: Basic Books, 1983, p. 91. 3 Tolstoy, Leo, Reflections and Essays, translated by Aylmer Maude, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961, p. 426. 4 Ibid., p. 427. 5 Ibid., p. 432. 6 Ibid., p. 435. 7 Ibid.

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8 Woodcock, George, Civil Disobedience, Toronto: CBC Publications, 1966, p. 44. 9 Berlin, Isaiah, “Tolstoy and Enlightenment”, in Matlaw, Ralph E. (ed.), Tolstoy: A Collection of Critical Essays, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1967, p. 39. 10 Green, Martin, Tolstoy and Gandhi, Men of Peace: A Biography, op. cit., p. 121. 11 Lukacs, George, “Tolstoy and the Development of Realism”, in Matlaw, Ralph E., op. cit., pp. 92–93. 12 Quoted in Woodcock, George, Civil Disobedience, op. cit., p. 46. 13 Sampson, Ronald Victor, Tolstoy: The Discovery of Peace, London: Heinemann, 1973, p. 151. 14 Shestov, Lev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, OH: Ohio University Press, 1969, p. 71. 15 Woodcock, George, Civil Disobedience, op. cit., pp. 49–50. 16 Quoted in Green, Martin, Tolstoy and Gandhi, Men of Peace: A Biography, op. cit., p. 100. 17 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, edited by Anthony Parel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. XXXVI, XXXVII. 18 Brown, Judith M., “Gandhi as a Nationalist Leader”, in Brown, J. and Parel, A.J. (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 55. 19 Weber, Thomas, “Gandhi’s Moral Economics”, in The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, op. cit., p. 143. 20 Dayal, Parmeshwari, Gandhian Theory of Social Reconstruction, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2006, pp. 221–222. 21 Ibid., p. 230. 22 Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970, p. 4.

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3 BEYOND VIOLENCE A comparative analysis of Hannah Arendt and Mahatma Gandhi

When considering the subject of nonviolence, the name of Hannah Arendt may not quickly spring to mind. Despite her vigorous advocacy of participatory politics and her famous critique of the totalitarian system, Arendt rarely addressed directly the philosophy of nonviolence, except occasionally to discuss the issues of power and violence. She mentioned Gandhi only once in her writings and that was in her essay “On Violence”, where she reminded us that “If Gandhi’s enormously powerful and successful strategy of nonviolent resistance had met with a different enemy – Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, even prewar Japan, instead of England, the outcome would not have been decolonization, but massacre and submission.”1 Though having been an acute and attentive analyst of the American society, Arendt’s conceptions of political pluralism and ethos of worldliness never truly focused on the political project of the American civil rights movement and more specifically the nonviolent struggle of Martin Luther King Jr. Even her controversial essay entitled “Reflections on Little Rock”, which followed the historical events that unfolded in Little Rock in the fall of 1957 and the spring of 1958, argues against forced integration, which according to her undermines the basis of cooperation and diversity in the American society, without taking seriously into consideration the nonviolent campaigns of Martin Luther King Jr and his followers. As wrong as Arendt might be on so many of the particulars of the situation in the American civil rights movement and in relation with the true philosophical significance of the Gandhian nonviolence, her views stand as a warning to a too-facile version of dismissing nonviolence as an irrelevant mode of political thought. As such, Arendt’s strict distinction between politics and morality, as well as her critique of the moralism of political views beyond the proper limits of politics, brings her to dismiss nonviolence as a way of 25

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moralizing politics, though she perceives it as a tool in the process of constituting or perpetuating freedom in the public sphere. Unlike Gandhi who derives political decision-making from the primacy of the ethical on the political, Arendt makes clear, both in her essay on Lessing, “On Humanity in Dark Times” and in On Revolution, that ethic of compassion is of no political significance. According to her, Because compassion abolishes the distance, the worldly space between men where political matters, the whole realm of human affairs, are located, it remains, politically speaking, irrelevant and without consequence. . . . As a rule it is not compassion which sets out to change worldly conditions in order to ease human suffering, but if it does, it will shun the drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics, and lend its voice to the suffering itself, which must claim for swift and direct action, that is, for action with the means of violence.2 Though Arendt acknowledges that “solidarity” and not “compassion” makes “a community of interest with the oppressed”, her analysis does not really support the idea that selflessness and care for the other is the foundation of moral consciousness. We would recall Arendt’s uncompromising idea that “In the centre of moral considerations of conduct stands the self: in the centre of political considerations of conduct stands the world.”3 This passage is familiar to all of Arendt’s readers. She means to situate the political outside of the individual and in-between a plurality of human beings. As such, she insists that we depend on others for our sense of reality and for the task of organizing our political coexistence. However, a basic question remains: does morality originate in human plurality or as Arendt seems to say, concerns the individual in his singularity? I think the sense of morality that Arendt has in mind when she says, “In the centre of moral considerations . . . stands the self” is the morality which she finds in the Socratic idea, taken from Gorgias (469c), which prohibits against involvement in evil doing. As Socrates says, it is better to suffer wrong than do wrong. If this morality concerns our actions amongst others, it is, therefore, a morality of the world rather than that of the self. It is abstention from participation in acts of evil and to leave aside acts of violence. To be sure, Arendt makes it clear that the 26

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question of living harmoniously with oneself goes with the primacy of the question of what I owe others. This is why Arendt, in her book On Violence, shows special attention to “the willingness to suffer”, which gives evidence of one’s serious commitment to moral resistance against injustice. Therefore, I would argue that for Arendt presence among others requires not only acting but also the capacity of suffering. Linking action to suffering takes us immediately out of solipsism and to the question of responsibility in acting. I suffer for the other because I share a collective responsibility with my fellow humans. To say that I suffer means that I am present among others and my suffering initiates a chain reaction of plurality. This is because suffering is a form of action that though it may proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every action becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of new processes . . . the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.4 Suffering is unpredictable because it is a capacity to alter situations by engaging in them; but also, and primarily, because it takes place within the web of human relationships, within a context defined by morality. As such, the risk of suffering forces the actor to accept that he/she is bound up with others, and is bound to act against some even as he/she acts for others. It is also because one suffers that one can forgive. Forgiveness plays a crucial role in Hannah Arendt’s understanding of political action. In The Human Condition she claims that forgiveness allows the public sphere to remain both confident and able to move from the past into the future. Forgiveness is perceived by Arendt not only as an opportunity for a new commencement or recommencement, but also as releasing the political future of a society from the results of its past misdeeds. This break with the past, therefore, is an act of freedom that would be impossible without the faculty of forgiving. Moving on from the past – while not constituting a completely new way of thinking – entails a negation of and liberation from past actions. In contrast to revenge and retaliation, the act of forgiving is a way to remedy an action’s predicament of irreversibility: “Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of 27

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its consequences forever.”5 Forgiveness here is clearly linked to a society’s genuine action to free itself from the chain of revengeful attitudes and to reestablish the moral integrity of the public sphere. The individual who forgives is an actor emerging out of his/her forced marginality in order to enter into relations with others based on plurality. In this play of commencement or recommencement lies an act of narrating or interpreting history without being crushed by the memory of guilt. Therefore, forgiveness is on the one hand a genuinely new and free action, and on the other hand “the miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin”.6 It may be said that Arendt’s phenomenology of forgiving is her own version of liberating the individual and the society from the cycle of violence. Nonviolence is thus central to political theory for Arendt. But Arendt’s political theory is only concerned with the problem of limiting violence, never suggesting nonviolence as a mode of political construction. However, like Gandhi, Arendt finds the need to equilibrate means and ends. Because though she sees that violence is an extricable part of political realm, she recognizes the fact that violent means have a potential to produce a cycle of resentment and revenge. This is more clearly developed in On Violence, Arendt’s most important book on the role of violence in political life. For Arendt, violence signals a descent into conditions which, instead of ameliorating the detrimental effects of dictatorships, either reawaken them in new forms or even exacerbate them. She emphasizes Aristotle’s point that man, “to the extent that he is a political being, is endowed with the power of speech,” while “Violence itself is incapable of speech.”7 The point is to focus on power rather than violence, for the latter “is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues.”8 Arendt argues that violence is “utterly incapable” of creating power: The danger of violence, even if it moves consciously in a nonextremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end. If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will be not merely defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic.9 She thereby explains succinctly how violence diminishes the power of those who use it. So for there to be a politics at all, each promise must insist upon its nonviolent terms and conditions. Hence Arendt’s repeated insistence on resisting the simplistic reduction of politics to 28

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violence and standing in opposition to the claim that violence is necessary for all foundations and unavoidable in all revolutions, a claim that she suggests is refuted by the American revolutionary experience and to which we can also add the nonviolent struggle of the Indian independence movement. Arendt’s reflections on politics and violence have the merit of returning our attention to the fundamental dimensions of the Gandhian thought as always ultimately concerned with a conception of nonviolent transformative politics. In her essay “What is Freedom?” Arendt affirms eloquently that “Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake.”10 In the case of a figure like Mahatma Gandhi, courage goes hand in hand with self-sacrifice and self-transformation. As such, Gandhi struggled not only to liberate the Indian society from colonial rule, but he also made an effort to transform himself into a nonviolent activist. According to Gandhi, a Satyagrahi had to participate in Truth and Truth “could not depend on individual impressions and decisions alone”; it had to be extraordinarily disciplined, with a “commitment to suffer the opponent’s anger without getting angry and yet also without ever submitting to any violent coercion”.11 For Gandhi, truth is not only a metaphysical category but also a moral and a political concept signifying the importance of truth in social life. In this regard, Gandhi does not dismiss the concept of truth from the sphere of action. He seeks to comprehend which uses of truth cancel pluralism and which conversely warrant pluralism. Truth is a moral link between different actions and it cements the gap between political freedom and moral necessity. Therefore to adhere to truth is based on the principle that moral life is centered around truth-following. Gandhi’s argument in support of this is that truth is the foundation of nonviolence and he often claims that truth and nonviolence are the two sides of the same coin. In other words, truth has the character of a moral imperative which is self-imposed on the truth-seeker by his/her “inner voice”. The inner voice cannot be fully defined in words, but it may be described as one’s conscience. Gandhi refers to the inner voice as a Truth force or Soul force that would lead us to peaceful solution to conflicts in life. So the purpose of listening and responding to the inner voice is for practical and progressive reality transformation. Guided by the inner voice, Gandhi decided to undertake fasts as form of self-sacrifice through which he wished to arouse compassion in other people’s hearts. He fasted many times to end bloodshed between Hindus and Muslims even in his last fast when he was seventy-eight. For him fasting was a political action, but also an 29

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experiment with truth. The idea of an experiment with truth primarily means abiding by the principle of truth in thought, action and speech. For Gandhi an experiment with truth is always empirical and open to inspection and revision. Thus, the Gandhian experiments with truth are moral practices which are undertaken in the midst of a political action. Gandhi chose politics as the field of his experiments with truth. That is why for Gandhi, truth and nonviolence go together, truth as the end and nonviolence as the means. Gandhi considers nonviolence as a means to truth because he believes that only a nonviolent person can attain truth. Here Gandhi holds that nonviolence is the practical and political way to truth and leads us to the ultimate victory of truth over untruth. In other words, a Satyagrahi or follower of nonviolence does not mind sacrificing his/her life for the sake of truth and thus is ready to encounter any difficulty on the path of truth. Satyagraha as a political weapon also does not lose its moral grounding in view of the fact that, for Gandhi, morality and politics go together. Therefore, in the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolence, truth wears a human face and speaks to everyone in the inner voice, thus compelling each person to respond to the fundamentally political problem that the public world continually raises. In order to import some kind of meaning to the concept of nonviolence as a moment of “shared sovereignty” and shear of the concept of modern politics of its State-oriented treatment, Gandhi presents the idea of shared sovereignty as a regulatory principle and, at the same time, as a guarantee that there is a limit to the abusive use of political power. It is also a principle that has a meaning only with reference to the idea of responsibility. The major shift in focus that appears in the Gandhian debate is from the everlasting idea of deriving a political decision from the primacy of the political to an idea of the primacy of the ethical where the pursuit of moral life in politics takes Gandhi to an argument in favor of the responsibility of citizens. Gandhi to challenge the modern State is, therefore, not just the ground of its legitimacy but on its basic rationale itself. The Gandhian principle of nonviolence is presented, therefore, as a challenge to the violence that is always necessarily implicated with the foundation of a sovereign order. Gandhi’s critique of modern politics leads him to a concept of the political which finds its expression neither in the “secularization of politics” nor in the “politicization of religion”, but in the question of “ethics of togetherness” which is framed in terms of a triangulation of ethics, politics and religion. This Gandhian moment of politics leads indubitably to the possibility of a synthesis between the two concepts of 30

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individual autonomy and nonviolent action. Gandhi succeeds in making new words of ancient wisdom in turning the Hindu and Jain concept of “ahimsa” into a civic temperament and a democratic allure. As such, Gandhi believed that the center of gravity of modern politics needed to be shifted back from the idea of material power and wealth to righteousness and truthfulness. In his critique of modernity, Gandhi saw modern civilization as promoting ideals of power and wealth that were based on individual self-centeredness and the loss of bonds of community that were contrary to moral and spiritual common good (dharma). Therefore, as in the Hindu concept of purusharthas, meaning objectives of a human being, Gandhi advocated a life of balance, achievement and fulfillment. Ultimately in Gandhi’s political philosophy the two concepts of self-government and self-sufficiency are tied into his political ideal of Ramarajya, the sovereignty of people based on pure moral authority. For Gandhi, therefore, politics is a constant self-realization, self-reflection and self-reform within the individual. It is a process of self-rule through which citizens are able to contribute to the betterment of the community. Far from being utopian, Gandhi approached this idea of self-rule as a philosophical foundation for the evaluation of existing political practices in the contemporary world. As King Jr once affirmed, “Timid supplication for justice will not solve the problem. We’ve got to confront the power structure massively.”12 In Gandhi’s mind, democratizing politics meant not only ending British colonialism but also waging a nonviolent action on coercive power relations and unjust social structures. For him, the stability of human civilization, the democratic potential of a community and the moral dignity of individuals depended on challenging the evils of the growing gap between a sovereign State and its citizens. As such, nonviolence is the cornerstone of citizenship as a space of empowerment and self-government. That is why Gandhi believed in a more enlightened and mature form of democracy as the exercise of active citizenship. By this he meant that the success of democracy depends on its dialogical nature. The very essence of democracy, then, is the dialogue of citizens among themselves and the success of democracy is therefore the success of this dialogue. Therefore, the breakdown of dialogue always means a breakdown of democracy and the failure of the very foundations of the body politic. Violence is liable to present itself as the ultimate means of expression of the anti-political. For Gandhi in the same way as for Arendt, the aim of politics is constructing the future of “humans living together”, though, according to Arendt, politics engages the human adventure outside the grips 31

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of truth and in the indeterminacy of the future. So the future gives rise to opinion, not truth, but at the same time Arendt believes that we need a safeguard against opinions that would approve and promote violence and barbarity. Arendt thus seems caught in a dilemma: in particular, contra Plato and Descartes, she makes it clear that the realm of politics is the realm of opinion and the pursuit of truth is a solitary business, since truth can be known by each knower individually, but she is also conscious about the fact that the realm of politics needs to be rescued from the dangers of relativism and the murder of doxa victims by doxa killers. Arendt tries to rescue politics from the dangers of relativism by a rejection of the confusion of opinions. As a result, she considers rational truth as nothing more than an opinion which is shared and becomes the criterion by which to carry an action in the public sphere. In this sense, all opinions are not equivalent, because all opinions do not seek the truth. As Arendt writes in her Denktagebuch, (Book XXIV, No. 21): There will always be One against All, one person against all others. [This is so] not because One is terribly wise and All are terribly foolish, but because the process of thinking and researching, which finally yields truth, can only be accomplished by an individual person. In its singularity or duality, one human being seeks and finds – not the truth (Lessing) – but some truth. This requires a distinction among opinions and the political worlds that they draw. If the norm from which to draw is the political world of plurality, it is, therefore, politics as the common ground of reality and responsibility which defines the limits of violence permissible by an opinion. In short, the idea of the “care for the world” should make a doxa truthful. This is maybe the reason why, in answer to questions posed in 1963 by the journalist Samuel Grafton regarding her report, Arendt states: “Once I wrote, I was bound to tell the truth as I see it.” Arendt’s point is simple: we cannot give up on truth, even when we fight against the absolutization of truth. This is because the loss of truth leads to the loss of the common world. Without truth, without the ability to say what is, there is nothing that holds us together. In other words, from Arendt’s point of view the world which is concerned with the process of truth-telling is a world where the principle of violence is tamed. As such, the ultimate reason to reject violence is not the will to save oneself, but the knowledge that living with 32

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violence would be intolerable. Though for Arendt, unlike Gandhi, nonviolence retreats from a notion of truth as “objective”, nonetheless, as she argues, it has nothing to do with a kind of subjective relativism where everything is considered in terms of the self-interest. Arendt is not invoking hereby a moral or religious foundation for the process of nonviolence in the political world, such as “thou shalt not kill.” In her reading of Arendt, Julia Kristeva asks: “If we resist the traditional safeguard of religions, with their focus on admonishment, guilt and consolation, how can our individual and collective desires avoid the trap of melancholic destruction, manic fanaticism, or tyrannical paranoia.”13 I want to argue that Arendt answers Kristeva’s question by arguing in favor of the idea of friendship as a political principle of nonviolence. Though without recourse to transcendent principles, friendship, for Arendt, could give rise to a nonviolent dimension of human solidarity in the face of humanity’s demonic capabilities. As Arendt suggests, human solidarity is where violence is tamed through the fundamental exigency of assuming responsibility for what is just and what is unjust. It is important to bear in mind that, for Gandhi, nonviolence was not simply a political tactic but pulling out all support for an unjust system and non-cooperation with the evil. Gandhi, of course, is very concerned with violence in the more usual sense of overt physical violence. Unlike Arendt, he devotes considerable attention to identifying such violence not only in the social dimension, but also in the linguistic, economic, psychological, cultural and religious dimensions. These many dimensions of violence interact, mutually reinforce each other and provide the subject matter for his philosophy of nonviolence. Unlike most philosophers and others who adopt political approaches, Gandhi places a primary emphasis on the nonviolent education of the citizens. The much greater strength of Gandhi’s educational approach to nonviolence is in terms of preventative socialization, relations and interventions so that we do not reach the stage of overt violence and war. Key to this preventative approach is Gandhi’s famous analysis of means and ends. Gandhi rejects utilitarianism and many other positions, which assume or maintain that economic, political and other ends justify the means. According to him, nonviolence must emphasize both means and ends. Gandhi argues that we cannot justify the means by the ends because there is an “inviolable connection” between the means and the ends. His perspective is totally opposite that of Frantz Fanon who justifies violence in order to decolonize or dispose of the oppressor. As we know, Fanon considers violence as a liberating force. 33

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“Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon,” he explains, for “Colonialism is violence in its natural state and will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”14 However, for Gandhi the process of liberation could not really be separated from the nonviolent ends of liberation itself as it is this active process that specifically gives both the individual and the nation back the ethical dimension that had been stripped by colonialism. Gandhi saw the development of an independent and free society as one in which each individual would adhere to the principle of nonviolence and would willfully choose to serve society as a whole. “Self-evolution is wholly consistent with a nation’s evolution,” he said, because freedom of the individual will from any violence would lead irrevocably to the freedom of the nation from violence. As such, where Gandhi sees the self-transformative nonviolent liberation as the generating force behind both political liberation and national regeneration, Fanon derives the destructive process of liberating from collective liberation itself. Therefore, where Fanon teaches us the value of a strategic essentialism in the use of violence in conditions of oppression as a harbinger of a new humanism, Gandhi talks about the sacrifice of violence in the colonized self in order for nonviolent resistance to succeed. Once again, for Gandhi, the relationship between truth and nonviolence is axiomatic. Since one cannot be certain that one possesses the absolute truth in a given situation, one has to proceed nonviolently. However, Fanon’s views on truth being “what hurts the oppressed most”, for him the enlightening and healing powers of violence have the capacity to cure the ailments of the colonized while unifying a people as a basis for a new nation. In view of Fanon’s characterization of violence as an essential component in the process of political liberation, it is not surprising that Arendt is highly critical of him in her book On Violence. Where Fanon considers violence as a “necessary” aspect of politics, Arendt sees violence as destructive of politics. In Fanon’s analysis, therefore, the instrumental character of violence can be channeled to create a new and better world. As for Arendt, I believe, she is closer to the Gandhian critique of violence when she affirms: Violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end which must justify it. And since when we act we never know with any amount of certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing, violence can remain rational only if it pursues short-term goals. Violence does not promote causes, it promotes neither History 34

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nor Revolution, but it can indeed serve to dramatize grievances and to bring them to public attention.15 In the same way as Gandhi, Arendt’s argumentation against those who make a claim to the political instrumentality of violence draws attention to the absurdity of arguments that rest on the idea that we can rely on the subordination of the means to the ends and on the certainty of outcomes of human action in violent politics. Both Gandhi and Arendt are committed to an ideal of politics without violence, whether in the form of the post-colonial or the classical tradition of civic republicanism. But, in the end, both argue that nonviolence is the only way in which public action and participatory deliberation can give shape to an authentic democratic power. Therefore, both Gandhi and Arendt believe that human dignity discloses itself most fully in a nonviolent political action. Hence, the urgency for a democratic constitutional framework that could prevent the constant expansion of violent human social and political activities, which they both identify as lethal to political freedom. Maybe this is one central idea in both Gandhi and Arendt’s political theories that cannot be considered as obsolete whatever changes have occurred within the framework of global politics during the past 50 years.

Acknowledgment This chapter is a revised version of a lecture “Beyond Violence: A Comparative Analysis of Hannah Arendt and Mahatma Gandhi”, delivered at the New School for Social Research, New York, February 2013.

Notes 1 Arendt, Hannah, On Violence, New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1969, p. 53. 2 Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990 [1963]), p. 86–87. 3 ‘Collective Responsibility,’ in Responsibility and Judgment, New York: Schoken, 2003, p. 153. 4 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 190. 5 Ibid., p. 237. 6 Ibid., p. 247. 7 Arendt, Hannah, On Violence, op. cit., p. 51. 8 Ibid., p. 70.

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9 Ibid., p. 44. 10 Arendt Hannah, “What Is Freedom?”, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, New York: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 156. 11 Iyer, Raghavan, The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 314–320. 12 The Washingtonian, February 1968, p. 53, quoted in Echols, James (ed.), I Have a Dream: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Future of Multicultural America, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004, p. 19. 13 Kristeva, Julia, Hannah Arendt, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 129. 14 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of The Earth, London: Penguin Books, 1963, pp. 26–27, 47. 15 Arendt, Hannah, On Violence, op. cit., p. 79.

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4 TWO CONCEPTS OF PLURALISM A comparative study of Mahatma Gandhi and Isaiah Berlin

When the definitive history of democratic thought in the twentieth century is written, both Mohandas K. Gandhi and Isaiah Berlin will take their places as the two most distinguished theorists of the pluralist tradition. As history goes, Gandhi and Sir Isaiah never met and the latter never wrote any piece on the former. However, Isaiah Berlin visited India in 1961 and met with Jawaharlal Nehru, but he never considered seriously the views of Gandhi as an anticolonial leader. In his talk delivered in New Delhi on 13 November 1961 on “Rabindranath Tagore and the Consciousness of Nationality”, Berlin presents himself a person who is “shamefully ignorant of Indian civilization, even of what is most valuable and most important in it”.1 In this relatively forgotten essay on Tagore’s thoughts on nationalism, Isaiah Berlin mentions Gandhi only once when he argues that: There are other paths to power, but Tagore rejects them: Nietzchean amoralism and violence are self-defeating, for these breed counter-violence. On this he agreed with Mahatma Gandhi and Tolstoy; but he did not accept Tolstoy’s angry simplifications, his self-isolating, anarchist attitude, nor the Mahatma’s essentially (on this I am subject to correction) unpolitical, unsecular ends.2 One might be tempted to describe Berlin’s reading of Gandhi as an “unpolitical” and “unsecular” historical figure by saying that it is a big mistake. But this would not account for the “greatness” that Berlin sees in Gandhi, a view that is developed in the lengthy conversations that I had with him. Nevertheless, one can argue that despite many evident 37

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points of difference between Gandhi and Berlin, there are many remarkable similarities between the two and especially with regard to the concept of “pluralism”. Gandhi and Berlin could be considered to be the most influential protagonists of modern pluralism. However, though the two thinkers share pluralism as meta-political goal, they have different views about the function of pluralism in politics. While Isaiah Berlin considered himself principally as a value pluralist, Mahatma Gandhi was described by some as an “integral pluralist”. Unlike many liberals, Berlin wrestled all through his intellectual life with the tension between pluralism and monism, and also between universalism and particularism. He rejected all monistic approaches to the question of truth, but criticized as well the moral relativism inscribed in the modern tradition of thought. As for Gandhi, his astute understanding of religion, culture and politics was envisaged at each level with an argumentation against monistic views and in favor of value pluralism. Gandhi’s doctrine of pluralism – that there are multiple aspects to truth and reality – is usually discussed and elaborated as an adjunct to his philosophy of nonviolence. However, one could conceivably understand Gandhi’s moral pluralism either as an alternative to cultural relativism, which insists on the relative value of all beliefs, or simply as a way of accommodating irreconcilable values in a political setting, which would require a minimum level of opportunity for choice. It is worth remarking that both Berlin and Gandhi were distrustful of absolutes in the strict sense of the word. Gandhi’s profound reinterpretation of Hindu values in the light of his personal view of pluralism was to build a bridge, principally, between the idea of common good and individual spiritual development. That is why Gandhi transformed the world-denying dimension of nonviolence into a world-affirming and world-loving political expression. But Gandhi’s understanding of what it means to be a world-loving self is closely related to his strong commitment to truth as a moral praxis. Gandhi based his theory of pluralism on the idea of the equal worth of individual conscience and the absence of absolute certainty of the truth. Gandhi considered that all conscience is equally worthy of respect and that is why one could never have such absolute certainty of one’s experience of truth. In other words, pluralism was needed to afford the appropriate respect to the sanctity of conscience in others. As such, Gandhi was a pluralist in matters of conscience, though he was not a relativist. His equal respect for all cultures and religions implied the idea of mutual learning and inter-faith dialogue. When Gandhi affirmed: “I do not want my house to be walled on all sides 38

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and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible,”3 he was essentially talking about a spirit of openness in the quest for the sacred which transcends religiosity and organized form of religion. Thus, Gandhi did not privilege any one religion over another, not even Hinduism. Religion for him was a matter of soft spirituality, rather than hard rituals and hard institutions. Therefore, he proclaimed: “For me the different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden, or they are branches from the same majestic tree. Therefore, they are equally true, though being received and interpreted through human instruments equally imperfect.”4 Gandhi’s pluralist attitude towards God and spirituality developed over time through his study of different religions and his friendships with individuals of faiths other than his own. Already as a young student in London, he believed that every religion can shed light on a seeker’s path. Later he realized that self-centeredness in religious matters as in political matters created prejudice and misunderstanding. This is the language he used in an article in Indian Opinion in 1907: “If the people of different religions grasp the real significance of their own religion they will never hate the people of any religion other than their own . . . there may be many religions, but the true aim of all is the same.”5 Essentially, for Gandhi, the very foundation of religion is ethics. As such, Gandhi’s religious pluralism is an application of his approach to ethics. For Gandhi, the only way to find God is to serve all human beings. As he puts it: Man’s ultimate aim is the realization of God, and all his activities, social, political, religious, have to be guided by the ultimate aim of the vision of God. The immediate service of all human beings becomes a necessary part of the endeavour, simply because the only way to find God is to see Him is His creation and be one with it. This can only be done by service of all.6 As we can see the nuclear element of Gandhi’s pluralistic thought is his idea of an ethical God, who is all-inclusive and develops love and ahimsa in every human conscience. As Gandhi explains: God is that indefinable something which we all feel but which we do not know. To me God is Truth and Love, God is ethics and morality. God is fearlessness. God is the source of light and life and yet He is above and beyond all these. God is 39

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conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist. . . . He is the greatest democrat the world knows, for he leaves us unfettered to make our own choice between evil and good.7 On this basis, we could say that Gandhi’s attitude toward the fellowship of all religions is founded on their shared moral values. It means the belief in a common ethical basis that transcends all religions and harmonizes them. In other words, Gandhi believed in a universal religion that included all religions and negated the spirit of divisiveness and exclusion, for these could not bring peace either inwardly or in society as a whole. This is why he affirmed: “Temples or mosques or churches . . . I make no distinction between these different abodes of God. They are what faith has made them. They are an answer to man’s craving somehow to reach the Unseen.”8 For Gandhi, God was not a monopoly of any religion. Already during his time in South Africa, he wrote: “The time had passed when the followers of one religion could stand and say, ‘ours is the only true religion and all others are false.’”9 As such, there is no trace of proselytizing or dogmatism in Gandhi’s proclamation of his spirituality. He truly believed in Hinduism as a religion of nonviolence and regarded the Bhagavad Gita as the philosophical foundation of his nonviolence. But his openness to other religious sources and his particular study of the New Testament and the Qur’an helped him to view Islam and Christianity as partners in his search for Truth. However, Gandhi’s commitment to pluralism was not only spiritual and metaphysical, but also social and political. His desire for economic and political inclusiveness is met in his confrontation with the structural violence implicit in power relationships. “Possession of power makes men blind and deaf,” says Gandhi. “They cannot see things which are under their very nose, and cannot hear things which invade their eras.”10 Therefore, the entire Gandhian enterprise of politics is to apply nonviolence to the Indian public sphere on the basis of the idea of transformative pluralism. As such, what Gandhi is suggesting is a social method of resolving conflicts without resentment and revenge. By doing this, he not only forces the violence into the open, but also seeks to establish civility and reciprocity as the cornerstones of political legitimacy. He constantly insists on enlarging the scope of transformative pluralism by attempting to cultivate one’s empathy with one’s opponents’ fears. But this overcoming of the logic of enmity is not something that Gandhi could accomplish without transforming the political into the ethical. As such, Gandhi’s anti-Hobbesian politics 40

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of social harmony converts egoistic individualism into a spirit of service. This was, for Gandhi, a universal method of transforming liberal citizenship into a civic friendship. It goes without saying that for Gandhi citizenship cannot accommodate differences, in the sense of alterity. Because of that, Gandhi believes that the principle of pluralism should be complemented by one that acknowledges the absolute singularity of the other. In short, the democratic community should do justice, according to Gandhi, to a double demand, that is, the demand of equality and the demand of respect for the difference of the other. These demands, however, can only come into being and flourish by acting in public space in Gandhi’s view. Therefore, those who are excluded as pariahs from the plurality of the shared world cannot participate in the Gandhian logic of civic friendship. So, according to Gandhi, this situation destroys the core of what he understands as the political, namely the civic ethos of shared sovereignty. That is why respecting, instead of erasing, differences between political visions is for Gandhi an important quality of civic friendship. The acknowledgment of the irreducible plurality of visions on the world that is possible in civic friendship enables the never-ending conversation about the public sphere and maintains the differences between the participants. Rather than fraternity or intimacy, civic friendship is for Gandhi the very condition for an effective exercise of plurality. However, Gandhi sees this plurality as a horizontal relationship of equality. The demand for equality in the relation between the self and the other transfers the Gandhian idea of pluralism to a transcendent future that is indefinitely pushed forward. But Gandhi’s claims about “equality” were not about giving “equal respect” to all values. He rejected the two concepts of “respect” and “tolerance” because of their connotation of condescension. Rather than “respecting” or “tolerating” other opinions, Gandhi incites people to listen to each other and to learn from each other. Moreover, according to Gandhi, opinions are of “equal value” in so far as they provide spiritual and moral growth. Consequently, this analysis allows the clarification of Gandhi’s antagonism to monism as a tradition of thought that does not possess the resources to change and the potential for the moral and spiritual growth of humanity. As a result, for Gandhi, there is no such thing as a fixed nature of human beings: they are in large part self-creators who are attracted by competing forms of valuable life. This is the essence of Berlin’s view of value pluralism. According to Isaiah Berlin, we are confronted in our lives with constellations of conflicting values. Given, then, such a situation, one 41

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must simply choose. Berlin describes his position as follows: “If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict – and of tragedy – can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social.”11 This is Berlin’s idea of value pluralism in a nutshell. The inevitable outcome of this incompatibility of values is dual: a tragic choice that always entails a sacrifice and the absence of a perfect life in the sense of total human fulfillment. As a result, for Berlin, not only is the idea of an ideal community incoherent and utopian, but also no compromise among values can bring us closer to a resolution of conflicts in history. As such, Berlin’s value pluralism penetrates all our cultures and sub-cultures, but though “we can discuss each other’s point of view, [and] we can try to reach common ground, in the end what you pursue may not be reconcilable with the ends to which I found that I have dedicated my life.”12 In other words, for Berlin, unlike Gandhi, there is no such thing as a common vision of the good life. Therefore, the way out must lie in some logically untidy, flexible and even unambiguous compromise. Every situation calls for its own specific policy, since “out of the crooked timber of humanity”, as Kant once remarked, “no straight thing was ever made.”13 Unlike Gandhi, for whom nonviolence expresses the best solution to the tensions and conflicts among individuals and traditions, Berlin uses the Lutheran metaphor of “crooked timber” to express his view of the non-reconciliation of contradictions in human history. However, though Berlin is quite pessimistic about the chance of ever eliminating conflicts among values in human societies, he remains nevertheless optimistic about the possibility of realization of what he calls a “decent society”. Thus, Berlin’s value pluralism goes hand in hand with a belief in a threshold of human decency, which is not fixed once for all. A decent society is, according to Berlin, a social organization where there is a basic human morality and respect for rights, which are in principle mutually harmonious under ordinary conditions. Moreover, Berlin does not see the foundations of this basic human morality in a transcendent world. A decent society is only possible if we accept that human beings are endowed with a basic morality, though according to Berlin our moral universe is essentially non-harmonious because, in it, value conflicts are not ultimately resolved. This is why Berlin’s philosophical use of the Kantian notion 42

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of “the crooked timber of humanity” is a way for him to point to the tragic nature of human nature which has to deal eternally with the ambiguities and incompatibilities in life. As such, Berlin is aware that the pursuit of a decent society is neither a romantic task, nor a heroic form of citizenship. Also, there is no higher end or purpose in life that can provide us with a faith in a basic morality. Berlin’s pluralism, therefore, is in the deepest sense anti-utopian and post-spiritual. With this anti-utopianism in mind, Berlin turns to Alexander Herzen and defines with him the ultimate goal of life as life itself. In a personal letter cited by Michael Ignatieff, Berlin writes: As for the meaning of life, I do not believe it has any. I do not at all ask what it is, but I suspect it has none and this is a source of great comfort to me. We make of it what we can and that is all there is about it. Those who seek for me deep cosmic all embracing. . . . libretto or God are, believe me, pathetically mistaken.14 As we can see like most post-spiritual and anti-utopian humanists, Berlin regards human history as free from any form of teleology that seeks meaning and with no pre-given goal to which human action is directed. The absence of higher laws and values to which we can refer to justify our political and historical choices gives rise to a much more fragmented view of pluralism combined with a permanent suspicion of human tendency to violence. The absence of a metaphysical realm to guarantee the ethical content of our actions deeply colors his value pluralism. This simply means that Berlin’s alternative to moral monism implies a set of principles which recommend a Kantian-inspired epistemology combined with the Herderian capacity for empathic understanding. What Berlin suggests after Herder is that, despite the vast differences of values between cultures, it is still possible to grasp an understanding of one another, by “empathy”. Berlin maintains that all cultures despite value-conflict have a shared core of common humanity. In other words, historical or national cultures may respond differently to the same finite number of needs and ends, thereby creating different, and often incompatible, “objective” constellations of values. Nevertheless, these commonalities are sufficient enough to enable mutual understanding and a dialogue among diverse cultures. It is this capacity of mutual understanding and empathy that distinguishes Berlin’s value pluralism from relativism. The key point in this respect is that the capacity for inter-cultural empathy is the 43

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evidence of the universality of values that give shape to that capacity and points to the adequacy of pluralism rather than relativism. Berlin does not give us a precise definition of these universal values that cross cultural boundaries, but he appears to endorse what he calls the “human horizon”, which is the basic common experience that identify us as human beings. As such Berlin’s idea of “shared human horizon” has a critical force of avoiding moral anarchy and relativism while acknowledging the plurality of modes of being human. On the constructive side, Berlin’s empathic pluralism encourages and promotes the inter-cultural dialogue by drawing on the idea of a basic humanity and relating different cultural views to each other. That is to say, its hermeneutical potentials are greater than its transgressive possibilities. If that is the case, then, Berlin’s empathic pluralism provides us with an evidence of his preoccupation with an intimate dialogue between cultures. Therefore, Berlin’s empathic pluralism is more than simply an insight into the minds and lives of other humans; it is also a way to coextend the human capacity for criticism of violence. Despite all the differences that one can find between the metaphysical and spiritual foundations of Gandhi’s idea of pluralism and Berlin’s suspicion of metaphysical and teleological claims in his definition of value pluralism, they both vindicate the possibility and acceptance of moral communication and reject the charge of relativism brought against their view of pluralism. For Gandhi and Berlin, one way of differentiating pluralism and relativism is to admit a core of shared or universal values which allows us to reach an agreement on at least some moral issues. Gandhi’s cultural pluralism is opposed to relativism, since it is based on a belief in a basic universal human nature beneath the widely diverse forms that human life and belief take across cultures. It also involves a belief in the fact that understanding moral views is possible among all people of all cultures because they all participate in the same quest for Truth. This why Gandhi affirms, “Temples or mosques or churches. . . . I make no distinction between these different abodes of God. They are what faith has made them. They are an answer to man’s craving somehow to reach the Unseen.”15 Such a pluralist attitude conducted at the deepest level and in a spirit of genuine reciprocity and solidarity was not for Gandhi just a spiritual requirement, but also a political necessity. Pluralism, for Gandhi, is something substantive, involving the freedom of each individual to regulate their own lives without placing themselves at the mercy of their selfish desire. This is why Gandhi equates pluralism with the notion of self-rule, because it needs to be experienced by each one as 44

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an individual code of conduct and as a model at the national level. For Gandhi, a pluralist society is composed of disciplined individuals regulating their own lives. Elaborating on this idea he wrote in January 1939: “The power to control national life through national representatives is called political power. Representatives will become unnecessary if the national life becomes so perfect as to be self-controlled.”16 In other words, in Gandhi’s idea of a pluralistic society there would be continual reciprocity among all the members of society. That is why, in the Gandhian model of pluralism, we have an upward movement of authority from the “base” to the “apex” in the form of circles. Hence the Gandhian vision of pluralism is critical to and transcends the liberal democracy. Gandhi observes that: Although this is the age of democracy, I do not know what the word connotes; however, I would say that democracy exists where the people’s voice is heard, where love of the people holds a place of prime importance. In my Ramrajya, however, public opinion cannot be measured by counting of heads or raising of hands. I would not regard this as a measure of public opinion.17 This definition of public opinion holds the key to Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of pluralism, because it develops the necessary connectedness between the two concepts of negative and positive freedom. As for Berlin, his conception of a decent society is only required to give moral priority to standard human rights instead of a full set of democratic rights. According to him, “there is no necessary connection between individual liberty and democratic rule.”18 Berlin is well known as a political philosopher who gives the priority to negative freedom as the absence of interference to positive freedom as an effort to initiate social and political change. According to Berlin, positive freedom is more dangerous than negative freedom because it is more easily corrupted. Therefore, in the face of pluralism, Berlin ranks the liberal value of negative freedom ahead of others. Berlin’s specifically liberal view of freedom is certainly too narrow, though it is understandable in the political context of Cold War that he was formulating it. We have here the fundamental difference between Berlin’s conception of pluralism and Gandhi’s theory of obligation which extends the concept of citizen’s duties far beyond what he considers as an “individualist” and “hedonistic” sense of rights in liberalism. In the eyes of Gandhi, the negative freedom and individual autonomy of 45

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Berlinian type may appear so self-oriented as to be irreconcilable with a firm sense of political and social responsibility. From this perspective Gandhi’s idea of pluralism deflates Berlin’s liberal defense of individual rights by insisting that rights exist only as derivative from performance of duty. Moreover, Gandhi’s contribution to pluralist thought is the way he places such emphasis on duty that for him pluralism without responsibility is a contradiction in terms. We can refer here to a letter that Gandhi wrote to Maganlal Gandhi in 1910 in which he clearly makes the point of where one’s duty must lie. Please do not carry unnecessarily on your head the burden of emancipating India. Emancipate your own self. Even that burden is very great. Apply everything to yourself. Nobility of Soul consists in realizing that you are yourself India. In your emancipation is the emancipation of India.19 The relationship that Gandhi makes between one’s nobility of soul and the primary role of the person in fulfilling social responsibilities contributes to the empathic conception of pluralism from a non-liberal angle. The conclusion to be made here is how this Gandhian mode of thinking pluralism offers a way to enlarge the Berlinian concept of value pluralism as an alternative of moral monism. It is true that Gandhi’s transformative conception of pluralism did not have any appeals on a Western liberal theorist like Berlin. However, although Berlin’s conception does not take us to defend a classical or laissez-faire form of liberalism, it is true that its lack of a Gandhian Constructive Program is a real weakness in its position overall. This does not mean that, in trying to strike a balance between the Gandhian and Berlinian concepts of pluralism, anything goes, but it does suggest that, despite their essential differences, the two conceptions can be read as complementary in order to hold on to the idea of a common human horizon. To judge by the continuing controversy stimulated by the pluralist ideas of Gandhi and Berlin, one can conclude that they have both left us with clues that are well worth following up. This is a small step towards that objective.

Acknowledgment This chapter is a revised version of the lecture “Two Concepts of Pluralism: A Comparative Study of Mahatma Gandhi and Isaiah Berlin”, delivered at Reset-Dialogues Seminar, May 2013. 46

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Notes 1 Berlin, Isaiah, The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996, p. 249. 2 Ibid., p. 263. 3 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Young India, June 1921, p. 170. 4 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Harijan, 1 January 1937. 5 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. VII, New Delhi: Publications Divisions, Government of India, 1958– 1994, p. 338. 6 Bose, N.K., Selections From Gandhi, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publications, 1957, p. 25. 7 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Young India, March 1925, quoted in Datta, M.D., The Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1953, p. 30. 8 Quoted in Kripalani, Krishna (ed.), All Men Are Brothers, Paris: UNESCO, 1969, p. 62. 9 Quoted in Nanda, B.R., Gandhi and Religion, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 13. 10 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Young India, 13 October 1921, in CWMG, Vol. 24, p. 87. 11 Berlin, Isaiah, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 169. 12 Berlin, Isaiah, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 12. 13 Berlin, Isaiah, Four Essays on Liberty, op. cit., p. 39. 14 Quoted in Ignatieff, Michael, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1999, p. 279. 15 Quoted in Kripalani, Krishna (ed.), All Men Are Brothers, op. cit., p. 62. 16 Quoted in The Penguin Gandhi Reader, New Delhi, 1993, p. 79. 17 Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG), 90 Vols., New Delhi, 1958, Vol. 35, pp. 489–490. 18 Berlin, Isaiah, Liberty, edited by Henry Hardy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 177. 19 Quoted in CWMG 10, pp. 206–207.

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5 GANDHI AND CASTORIADIS Self-government and autonomy

In a world like ours where societies wholeheartedly subscribe to the logic of the market and where there is a significant decline of political passion among the population, the claim to search and struggle for autonomy and self-transformation are frequently treated with cynicism and skepticism and dismissed as a foolish aspiration for a Golden Age. However, during the past 100 years, two dominant modes of thinking have suggested stimulating and challenging ways of theorizing and practicing the concept of autonomy as a project for the selftransformation of liberal societies and democratization of democracies. These two projects have been echoed by two political and intellectual figures of twentieth century: on the one hand, Mahatma Gandhi, a moral and spiritual leader of nonviolent revolution in India, on the other, Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–97) an influential figure of the French intellectual left. A philosopher, a political theorist, a professional economist at the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), a psychoanalyst, he was also one of the founders of the leftist theoretical group Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949–67) whose intellectual legacy was present in the minds and actions of the leaders of the events of May 1968 in France. For many of us who followed the seminars and writings of Cornelius Castoriadis, they were certainly considered as milestones on the way to radical politics defined in terms of autonomy. Castoriadis began his theoretical quest with an implacable critique of Soviet Marxism as a new form of bureaucratic exploitation, to which he suggested an alternative, socialist self-management. This investigation ended with a critique of Marxism as a “reactionary ideology” and a new form of “heteronomy” or the rule of alienated institutions. As a result, for Castoriadis, the groundwork for emancipating social arrangements was exemplified by what he called autonomy (auto 48

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[self] + nomos [law]) which described the contours of democratic self-determination through the “socialization” of all decision-making. Castoriadis remarked in an interview in 1992 that autonomy is “the project of a society in which all citizens have an equal, effective possibility of participating in legislating, governing, and judging, and in the last analysis, in instituting society.”1 Castoriadis’s relationship with Socialisme ou Barbarie should be considered politically and intellectually as the starting point of his grasp of the idea of autonomy. The central question of “how can we organize to create a new society?” to that of “could an egalitarian society emerge from a socialist revolution?” prepared the wake of Castoriadis in 1961 and his critique of Marxism. According to Castoriadis: The reality of Marxism is, first and absolutely foremost, to a shattering extent, that it is the ideology touted by exploitative, totalitarian, oppressive regimes exerting their power over a billion men and women. It is also the ideology of bureaucratic parties in other countries, whose goal we know to be the establishment of regimes identical and aforementioned, and whose day-to-day practices are an ongoing series of infamies. . . . Now Marx’s followers continue to believe that there’s a fullfledged, straightforward truth, and that it is materially deposited in his writings.2 Accordingly, Castoriadis establishes an analogy between the Marxist regimes and the religious societies in their heteronomous institutions of society. Castoriadis explains “heteronomy” as a state where law is provided from outside by others (this could be nature or history). This refers to how a given society institutes itself by searching its moral and political legitimacy in an extra-social principle like a god. In other words, what Castoriadis explains is that every society in history creates its own laws and norms, but not every society, like an autonomous society, acknowledges its self-foundational capacity and legitimacy. Unfortunately, most societies have drifted consciously or unconsciously all through history towards heteronomy and concealment of their explicit use of power. This is what Castoriadis calls “the inherited way of thinking”. According to him: Inherited ways of thinking can make only fragmentary contributions to this elucidation of the question of society and that of history. Perhaps this contribution is mostly negative, marking 49

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out the limits of a mode of thought and exposing its impossibilities . . . On the one hand, the inherited way of thinking has never been able to separate out the true object of this question and to consider it for itself. This object has almost always been split into a society, related to something other than itself and, generally, to a norm, end or telos grounded in something else, and a history, considered as something that happens to this society, as a disturbance in relation to a given norm or as an organic or dialectical development towards this norm or telos. In this way the object in question, the being proper to the social-historical, is constantly shifted towards something other than itself and absorbed in it.3 Castoriadis’s definition of “heteronomy” encompasses necessarily ontological and political dimensions. As such, from Castoriadis’s standpoint, the realization of heteronomy cannot be conceived only at the individual level, because it is realized, as an intersubjective relationship, as a moment of both the social and political realms. However, as mentioned previously, “heteronomy” in opposition to “autonomy” lacks conscious reflectiveness and it attributes no self-transparent role to the individual or the society. Castoriadis reaffirms this point by underlining the following point: Until when will humanity have the need to conceal the Abyss of the world and of itself behind instituted simulacra? The response, if response there be, can come only on the collective level and the individual level simultaneously. On both levels, it presupposes a radical alteration of one’s relation to signification. I am autonomous only if I am the origin of what will be . . . and I know myself as such.4 As discussed in previous paragraphs, the collective dimension of autonomy is considered by Castoriadis as a new way of conceiving social-historical creation and political transformation. Interestingly, if we examine the Gandhian insights from a Castoriadian perspective of “autonomy”, we can conclude that neither Castoriadis nor Gandhi falls into deterministic conceptions of politics or into relativistic positions. Though spirituality plays an important role in Gandhi’s concept of “swaraj”, he, nonetheless, builds an ontology that theorizes the subject as a socio-political agent that is transformative and able to evaluate and create social change in terms of autonomous 50

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practices. As such, both Gandhi and Castoriadis open in their own sweet manners a theory of openness and change that would allow and articulate in a comprehensive way a social and political practice of democracy as autonomy. Analyzed from this perspective, Gandhi’s critical position as a thinker and practitioner of autonomy finds its roots in the project of an open-ended ontology that breaks the social closure at the collective level by appropriating the instituting power and handing it to individual agencies that give themselves their own rules. This includes Gandhi’s leaning on the idea of self-rule as the creative potential of making and unmaking social laws. As a result, collective autonomy is ordered in the Gandhian perspective through reflectivity and deliberate action of agents of decision-making. This decision-making at the individual and collective levels implies the possibility of questioning oneself and the others while creating on a full scope of swaraj as a collective enterprise. As Anthony Parel points out, Gandhi argues that self-rule should influence not only the inner life of the individual but also his/her public life in the nation. . . . Self-rule brings the awareness of one’s civic and political obligations to others and to one’s country. Because of this, says Gandhi, the attainment of India’s political freedom is tied to the self-rule attained by each Indian. [As such] self-rule contributes directly to the welfare of the individual and indirectly to the welfare of the nation.5 As we can see, Gandhi’s idea of self-rule is not only a call to independence and freedom, but also an invitation to self-discipline, selfrestraint and self-transformation. For Gandhi, autonomy detached from developing oneself is nothing but what Kant calls, “being a member of a kingdom of ends”. This is why Gandhi adds the idea of “awakening” to his concept of swaraj. As he puts it, “A man should have full opportunity to develop himself. That will happen only when there is an awakening.”6 This will to be autonomous is considered by Castoriadis as a desire to be free. “You have to desire to be free”, affirms Castoriadis, “If you don’t have the desire you can’t be free. But desiring it isn’t enough; you have to do it; that is, you must advance a will, and implement a praxis, a reflective, deliberate praxis enabling 51

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the achievement of that freedom as the embodiment of a possibility inasmuch as it is desired.”7 It is interesting to see, that both Gandhi and Castoriadis refer to Socrates as an exemplification of an autonomous individual. For Gandhi, Socrates was a “great satyagrahi” who had the courage of dying for his thoughts. Gandhi’s commitment to frankness to courage of speaking truth to power parallels in many respects Socrates’s reliance on parrhesia. As for Castoriadis, he represents Socrates as a philosopher who goes against the current in ancient Athens. “Take the example of Socrates,” underlines Castoroadis: and the Athenian who merely thinks like everyone else. They speak the same language and have the same experience of the same period, but Socrates is something other than a simple Athenian picked out of the crowd. Today too, there are individuals who can take their distance from their own heritage – that’s what autonomy is.8 Undoubtedly, both Gandhi and Castoriadis could be considered as autonomous individuals. For them, the search for truth was more important than its possession. Their main accomplishment was to call into question conventional forms of authority and heteronomy in their respective time. Gandhi would have certainly agreed with Castoriadis when he mentions that for change to occur, for there to be true self-government, of course there has to be a change in the institutions so that people can participate in managing the affairs of the community, but also and above all, there has to be a change in the attitude of individuals toward institutions and public affairs, the res publica, or what the Greeks called ta koina (the affairs of the community).9 As for Gandhi, he would suggest that people develop their capacity for self-government through nonviolent methods of resistance against the authority of the State. According to Gandhi, “if you have only state production, men will become moral and intellectual paupers. They will forget their responsibilities.”10 Therefore, both Gandhi and Castoriadis do not accept to call “democracy” a social and political system which is imposed from outside by forcible methods. However, where 52

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democracy and violence go ill together in Gandhi’s thought, for Castoriadis, democracy as autonomy is the outcome of a revolutionary project. “What I call the revolutionary project”, asserts Castoriadis: the project of individual and collective autonomy (the two are inseparable) is not a utopia, but a social-historical project susceptible of being achieved, and which has never been shown to be impossible. Its achievement depends only on the lucid activity of individuals and peoples, their understanding, determination and imagination. . . . That’s what we may call the revolutionary project, with the understanding that revolution doesn’t mean massacres, wanton bloodletting, the extermination of counterrevolutionaries and the taking of the Winter Palace.11 Though Castoriadis does not support violence explicitly, however, he cannot be considered as a thinker or practitioner of nonviolence. This said, one should not forget that both Castoriadis and Gandhi, in their own way, criticize the process of privatization of politics and the rise of individualism in modern times. However, where Gandhi criticizes individualism as a social attitude which goes against the welfare of all (Sarvodaya), Castoriadis considers it as a form of “infantilism”. “In no other society I know of”, he says, “are people as immersed in society as they are today. People in fifteen million homes are pressing the same buttons at the same time to see the same thing. What a laugh!”12 As for Gandhi, he is even more critical than Castoriadis, and affirms: Unrestricted individualism is the law of the beast, of the jungle. We have to learn to strike the mean between individual freedom and social restraint. Willing submission to the social restraint for the sake of the well-being of the whole society enriches both the individual and the society of which one is a member.13 This leads Gandhi to a strong criticism of passivity and privatization in modern societies. As early as 1909, in his seminal work, Hind Swaraj, Gandhi attacks the evils of capitalism where, according to him, humans become slaves rather than citizens, abandoning morality and spirituality. Putting aside the whole Gandhian inclination for spirituality, Castoriadis claims that “capitalism is incompatible with true democracy.”14 As for Gandhi, he does not accept the capitalist mode of production as an ideal society where a wide gulf exists between the 53

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Haves and the Have-nots. That is why Gandhi had the conviction that a civilization which is founded on the two maxims of “might is right” and “survival of the fittest” would destroy itself. He, therefore, believes in the nonviolent destruction of capitalism and its replacement by his theory of trusteeship. Gandhi affirms: By the nonviolent method we seek not to destroy the capitalist, we seek to destroy capitalism. We invite the capitalist to regard himself as trustee for those on whom he depends for the making, the retention and the increase of his capital. . . . [Because] the capitalist is as much neighbour of the labourer as the latter is a neighbour of the former, and one has to seek and win the willing co-operation of the other.15 Castoriadis supported all his life the idea of self-management against capitalist bureaucracy and liberal oligarchy which, according to him, have the aim of transforming workers into objects. Moreover Castoriadis affirms that capitalist technology, and with it the whole corresponding, supposed by “rational: organization of production, aims at transforming workers into passive objects, into pure executants of tasks circumscribed, controlled and determined from outside by an Apparatus for managing production. . . . The system is constantly obliged to solicit, and to use, the initiative and activity of those very people it attempts to turn into robots.”16 As such, taking into account the weaknesses of Marx and Marxism, Castoriadis insists on demonstrating the contradictions and irrationality inherent in modern bureaucratic organization of the society. His remarks on what he calls “bureaucratic pseudo-planning” goes hand in hand with his critical view on the withdrawal of citizens from public affairs. Castoriadis adds: “Nowadays, individuals are in conformity to the system and the system to individuals.”17 In other words, Castoriadis believes in a radical change in our human society. Certainly Gandhi would not disagree with Castoriadis on the need for a radical change in modern civilization. Though, once again, his contribution in this area would be evaluated not only in terms of a civic responsibility, but also that of morality and spirituality. However, let us be clear on one point (which is clearly pointed out by Anthony Parel): “While Gandhi rejects, the epistemological and metaphysical 54

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premises of modern civilization, he enhances its scientific spirit and some of its key political values- – fundamental rights, civil liberty, freedom of conscience, expression, and association, and so forth.”18 Gandhi, therefore, wants the independent India to integrate the spirit of modern rationality. But at the same time, he does not want the new Indian society to put aside its spiritual inclinations and foundations. This is where Gandhi and Castoriadis separate, not to say contradict each other. That being the case, there is every reason why both Castoriadis and Gandhi should be studied separately, but also in comparison to each other. Accordingly, we need to remind ourselves that autonomy is not an easy task, but it is a necessary process to democratize democracy.

Notes 1 Quoted in Castoriadis, Cornelius, A Society Adrift: Interviews & Debates 1974–1997, translated by Helen Arnold, New York: Fordham University Press, 2010, p. 3. 2 Ibid., pp. 36–37. 3 Castoriadis, Cornelius, The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987, p. 167. 4 Castoriadis, Cornelius, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and Imagination, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, p. 329. 5 Parel, Anthony J., Pax Gandhiana: The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 85–86. 6 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, The Essential Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 184. 7 Castoriadis, Cornelius, A Society Adrift, op. cit., p. 233. 8 Ibid., p. 232. 9 Ibid., p. 4. 10 Quoted in Prabhu, R.K. and Rao, U.R., The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, Ahmedabad: N.J.P.H., 2007, p. 189. 11 Castoriadis, Cornelius, A Society Adrift, op. cit., pp. 3–4. 12 Ibid., p. 154. 13 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Harijan, 27 May 1939, quoted in Dayal, Parmeshwari, Gandhian Theory of Social Reconstruction, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2006, p. 81. 14 Castoriadis, Cornelius, A Society Adrift, op. cit., p. 237. 15 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, The Essential Writings, op. cit., pp. 97–98. 16 Castoriadis, Cornelius, A Society Adrift, op. cit., p. 110. 17 Ibid., p. 5. 18 Parel, Anthony J., Pax Gandhiana, op. cit., p. 143.

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6 GANDHI AND ABDUL GHAFFAR KHAN Critique of religious fanaticism

When Mahatma Gandhi arrived on the political scene of India in 1915, his nonviolent and pluralistic approach to religion and politics brought him in direct conflict with the issue of communalism and religious fanaticism. So far as the question of Hindu–Muslim unity was concerned, Gandhi had to confront two major perceptions in the Indian National Congress party. On the one hand, there was a group of Hindus within the Congress party which believed that the Indian Muslims were not sufficiently patriotic so far as the Indian Nationalism was concerned. On the other hand, there was a great feeling of Pan-Islamism among some of the Muslims leaders of the Congress, intensified with a color of doubt and skepticism in regard to the future of Islam in India. Viewed in this perspective, the divergence between Gandhi and communalists was very deep from the very beginning of his entrance on the Indian political scene. The reason is simple: for Gandhi the power of the nation was vested with the people, rather than religion. And the reason why Gandhi saw religion in the Indian intra-civilizational context rather in an ideological dimension was that he believed in the inherent harmony of the Indian cultural and social order, which had been disrupted by modernity. Gandhi was a pluralist in religious matters, though he was not a relativist. His equal respect for all cultures and religions implied the idea of mutual learning and inter-faith dialogue. When Gandhi affirmed: “I do not want my house to be walled on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible,”1 he was essentially talking about a spirit of openness in the quest for the sacred which transcends religiosity and organized form of religion. Thus, Gandhi did not privilege any one religion over another, not even Hinduism. Religion for him was a matter of 56

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soft spirituality, rather than hard rituals and hard institutions. Therefore, he proclaimed: “For me the different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden, or they are branches from the same majestic tree. Therefore, they are equally true, though being received and interpreted through human instruments equally imperfect.”2 Gandhi’s pluralist attitude towards God and spirituality developed over time through his study of different religions and his friendships with individuals of faiths other than his own. Already as a young student in London, he believed that every religion can shed light on a seeker’s path. Later he realized that self-centeredness in religious matters as in political matters created prejudice and misunderstanding. This is the language he used in an article in Indian Opinion in 1907: “If the people of different religions grasp the real significance of their own religion they will never hate the people of any religion other than their own . . . there may be many religions, but the true aim of all is the same.”3 Essentially, for Gandhi, the very foundation of religion is ethics. As such, Gandhi’s religious pluralism is an application of his approach to ethics. For Gandhi, the only way to find God is to serve all human beings. As he puts it: Man’s ultimate aim is the realization of God, and all his activities, social, political, religious, have to be guided by the ultimate aim of the vision of God. The immediate service of all human beings becomes a necessary part of the endeavour, simply because the only way to find God is to see Him is His creation and be one with it. This can only be done by service of all.4 As we can see the nuclear element of Gandhi’s pluralistic thought is his idea of an ethical God, who is all-inclusive and develops love and ahimsa in every human conscience. As Gandhi explains: God is that indefinable something which we all feel but which we do not know. To me God is Truth and Love, God is ethics and morality. God is fearlessness. God is the source of light and life and yet He is above and beyond all these. God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist . . . He is the greatest democrat the world knows, for he leaves us unfettered to make our own choice between evil and good.5 On this basis, we could say that Gandhi’s attitude toward the fellowship of all religions is founded on their shared moral values. It means 57

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the belief in a common ethical basis that transcends all religions and harmonizes them. In other words, Gandhi believed in a universal religion that included all religions and negated the spirit of divisiveness and exclusion, for these could not bring peace either inwardly or in society as a whole. This is why he affirmed: “Temples or mosques or churches . . . I make no distinction between these different abodes of God. They are what faith has made them. They are an answer to man’s craving somehow to reach the Unseen.”6 For Gandhi, the aim of spiritualizing politics is constructing the future of “human living together”. He, therefore, understood religion as a morally conscientious and socially responsible exercise of spirituality. Gandhi believed that every social and political opportunity must be made use of to forge a harmony among communities. His dialogue with Indian Muslims must be understood in this conceptual network. He sought to practically demonstrate this need of dialogue with Islam when he answered to a number of his critics in a speech at Sholapur in 1927 when they accused him of being partial to the Muslims. He said: You may say I am partial to the Mussalmans. So be it, though the Mussalmans do not admit it. But my religion will not suffer by even an iota, by reason of my partiality. I shall have to answer my God and my Maker if I give anyone less than his due, but I am sure that He will bless me if He knows that I gave some one more than his due. I ask you to understand me.7 While in South Africa where he started to work in 1893 as a lawyer for a Muslim merchant from Porbandar, Abdullah Sheth, Gandhi was able to establish close ties with the Indian Muslims. He felt familiar with the cultural identity of the Indian Muslims and shared a common life with them. “When I was in South Africa”, he affirms, I came in close touch with Muslim brethren there . . . I was able to learn their habits, thoughts and aspirations . . . I had lived in the midst of Muslim friends for 20 years. They had treated me as a member of their family and told their wives and sisters that they need not observe purdah with me.8 It was Abdullah Sheth who suggested Gandhi for the first time to read Sale’s translation of the Qur’an. Gandhi’s first approach to the Qur’an developed his basic understanding of Islam that was strengthened by a 58

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second reading during his prison time in January 1908 in Transvaal. But previous to this adventure, Gandhi had forged a broad resistance movement largely based on the participation of Indian Muslims and in alliance with the Hindus against racial discrimination in South Africa. In his very first week in Pretoria, Gandhi called a meeting at a Muslim merchant’s house. “It was a largely Muslim gathering with ‘a sprinkling of Hindus’.”9 The bringing together of Hindus and Muslims in the Gandhian experience of satyagraha in South Africa was Gandhi’s first important step toward the idea of communal harmony. This experience strengthened in him a powerful motivation in the joint commitment of Hindus and Muslims to truth and justice irrespective of their differences. By navigating easily between different religious traditions and communities, Gandhi convinced his fellow Indians of the validity of inter-faith solidarity. Gandhi had decided to affirm in South Africa that communal harmony and dialogue among religions was the only cure for violence and injustice. However, in this enterprise he was also helped by his readings of spiritual writers like Tolstoy. “We believe” asserted Gandhi, Tolstoy’s teaching will win increasing appreciation with the passage of time . . . He pointed out that selfish priests, Brahmins and Mullas had distorted the teaching of Christianity and other religions and misled the people. What Tolstoy believed with special conviction was that in essence all religions held soul-force to be superior to brute force. . . . There is no room in religion for anything other than compassion. A man of religion will not wish ill even to his enemy. Therefore, if people want to follow the path of religion, they must do nothing but good.10 There is no doubt that Gandhi’s action in South Africa and later in India was shaped by his conviction that all religious boundaries are arbitrary and false. That is why Gandhi’s view of religion brought under its fold people belonging to different religions. Though deeply religious by nature, Gandhi did not believe in rituals, customs, traditions, dogmas and other formalities observed for the sake of religion. Like Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi’s religion was not confined to Temples, Churches, books, rituals and other outer forms. Thus Gandhi’s concept of religion was not bound by any dogmatic behaviors. Gandhi was convinced that a mere doctrinaire approach in the field of religion does not help to create inter-religious fellowship. Dogmatic 59

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religions do not help to promote creative dialogue. The religions dogmas directly or indirectly breed an attitude of dislike towards other religions. Mahatma Gandhi’s mission was to find a common ground based on nonviolence among religions. He wanted not only to humanize religion but also to moralize it. He would reject any religious doctrine which was in conflict with morality. This is how he challenged people of faith to recognize their religious hypocrisies. Gandhi argued that a person who believes in Truth and God cannot go to a Mosque, Synagogue, Temple or Church one day, and the next day foster hatred and violence. He made no exception in the case of Islam. Gandhi did not hesitate to declare that even the teachings themselves of the Koran cannot be exempt from criticism. Every true scripture only gains by criticism. After all we have no other guide but our reason to tell us what may be regarded as revealed and what may not be.11 At another occasion, Gandhi completed this argument with an observation that takes us to heart of his position on religion and interreligious dialogue: “My effort should never be to undermine another’s faith but to make him [or her] a better follower of his [or her] own faith.”12 Gandhi knew that independence could not come about by the efforts of the Hindus alone. He, therefore, involved the Indian Muslims in the struggle. Discontent with the “us-and-them” divisions and mutual disregard between the Muslims and the Hindus, Gandhi engaged in an open dialogue with Islam and the Muslims. He never accepted the argument that Hindus and Muslims constituted two separate elements in Indian society. That is why Gandhi’s willingness to go out of his way to win over Muslims to the Congress won him many friends and admirers among the Muslims. In South Africa, “Gandhi had needed the wholehearted support of Muslim friends who went to jail with him, lived in his communities, supported him with funds, and generally made his victories possible.”13 On his return to India, Gandhi’s increasing involvement with the Khilafat movement helped him secure a political authority in the Indian Congress and strong legitimacy in the eyes of the British Raj. Gandhi’s involvement with the fierce believers in a Pan-Islamic movement surprised most of his friends and followers, but “his stance was essentially a natural progression from the status he had prized in South Africa as spokesman for Muslim grievances, and from his championship of the Ali brothers during the war.”14 It is true that the Muslim leaders like Abdul Bari, 60

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Maulana Azad and the Ali Brothers had already initiated and developed the Khilafat movement when they were joined by Gandhi in April 1918, but there is no shadow of doubt that Gandhi’s arrival gave a new strength to the agitation. Gandhi expressed his sympathy for the Muslims and the Khilafat movement at the Delhi Imperial War Conference in 1918 and later followed it up by a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford. “As a Hindu”, he mentioned, “I cannot be indifferent to their cause. Their sorrows must be our sorrows.”15 Evidently, Gandhi’s sympathy for the Khilafatists was more than a simple fellowship, since he was trying to invite the Muslim leaders to join his satyagraha and adopt nonviolence. Moreover, by joining the Khilafat movement Gandhi wanted to consolidate the fraternization of Hindus and Muslims. As such, two years later in response to Maganlal, who was troubled by Gandhi’s involvement with Muslims, he wrote: “If I had not joined the Khilafat movement, I think, I would have lost everything. In joining it I have followed what I especially regard as my dharma . . . I am uniting Hindus and Muslims.”16 Anthony Parel points out that in Hind Swaraj Gandhi employs dharma as an ethical equivalent for mutual assistance.17 This, of course, was how Gandhi had approached the Muslim leaders in the Khilafat movement. He “treated the Khilafat as a ‘Kamadhuk’, the mythical cow that gave whatever one asked of her”.18 Later Gandhi explained: “I have been telling Maulana Shaukat Ail [sic for Ali] all along that I was helping him to save his cow, i.e. the Khilafat, because I hoped to save my cow thereby.”19 Gandhi’s emergence as a strong political ally and an inspirational leader in the Khilafat movement was not, however, a simple matter of a great number of Muslims being converted to his nonviolent style of action. The Ali Brothers were never totally converted to nonviolence, though “as a gesture toward Hindus, Muhammad Ali stopped eating beef; departing from age-old practice, numerous Muslim homes celebrated Eid without beef.”20 Gandhi’s deliberate attachment to the Muslims and the Khilafat movement had helped him in reaching broader groups in Indian society and rising as a non-elitist leader in the Congress. However, the main line of division between Gandhi and the Khilafat leaders was that of violence. “The Muslim violence on the Malabar coast and the incipient violence of the extremer Khilafat leaders generated fear and resentment in other communities.”21 Many Muslim leaders like Shuakat Ali or Jinnah refused to accept nonviolence as a moral absolute though they accepted it as a temporary strategic device to overcome the British. Jinnah was among the Muslim leaders of the 61

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Congress Party who in 1915 welcomed Gandhi on his return from South Africa, but the variations on the non-cooperation campaign produced certainly some early divergences between the two men. Jinnah, whose opposition to Gandhi’s non-cooperation was well known to the British and to other members of the Congress Party, was especially perplexed by the fact that, by 1920, the Congress, like most of Muslim India, had accepted Gandhi as their charismatic leader. “Your methods have already caused split and division in almost every institution that you have approached hitherto,” proclaimed Jinnah: and in the public life between Hindus and Hindus and Muslims and Muslims and even fathers and sons; people generally are all over the country and your extreme programme has for the moment struck the imagination mostly of the inexperienced youth and the ignorant and the illiterate. All this means complete disorganization and chaos. What the consequence of this may be, I shudder to contemplate. . . . I do not wish my countrymen to be dragged to the brink of a precipice in order to be shattered.22 It is true that Gandhi’s Congress-Khilafat non-cooperation movement was partly responsible for Jinnah’s skepticism and bitterness, but it goes also without saying that Jinnah’s political style and the exaggerated “Britishness” that he adopted in his private and public life left him little opportunity to compete with Gandhi’s simplicity and transparency. It is absolutely clear that Jinnah’s dream of an independent India did not go hand in hand with the Hindu-Muslim unity. Generally speaking, though Jinnah pleaded for the Muslim cause before the Congress and the Hindu community through the years 1916 to 1938, he gradually gave up the idea of Hindu-Muslim unity and advocated the exclusive cause of Muslim India in the decade before the Independence. Jinnah’s correspondence with Pandit Nehru in 1938 bears clear testimony that Jinnah had reached a dead-end in his dealings with some of the leaders of the Congress. For Gandhi, the questions of Indian home rule and the Hindu-Muslim unity were not separate issues, whereas for Jinnah the opposite was true as he mentioned in response to Gandhi: We maintain and hold that Muslims and Hindus are two major nations by any definition or test of a nation. We are a nation of a hundred million, and what is more, we are a 62

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nation with our own distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, names and nomenclature, sense of values and proportion, legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions, aptitudes and ambitions, in short we have our own distinctive outlook on life and of life. By all canons of international law we are a nation.23 Jinnah strongly resented relating the swaraj movement in favor of Khilafat. He was, in the words of Durga Das, “Amazed that the Hindu leaders had not realized that this movement would encourage the PanIslamic sentiment.”24 Gandhi, however, saw in Khilafat an opportunity to seek Muslim cooperation in the swaraj movement. His political intentions in doing so were more democratic than theocratic. It would be wrong, therefore, to underline, as some analysts of Indian contemporary political history do, that Gandhi was “unwittingly responsible for jettisoning sane, secular, modernist leadership among the Muslims of India and foisting upon Indian Muslims, a theocratic orthodoxy of the Maulvis”.25 Jinnah, like Ambedkar, criticized Gandhi’s insistence on the spiritualization of Indian politics. He was against Gandhi’s view of bringing religious issues into the public sphere, because he considered it disastrous and irrelevant for political matters in India. Jinnah himself, however, prioritized religion, since he was considered as a “communalist” by many of his critics.26 In other words, in his long political career, Muhammad Ali Jinnah clearly perceived Indian self-determination in the framework of the Muslim community. As for Gandhi, it was quite the opposite. Ever since his first writings in South Africa, Gandhi replaced the divisive view of religion by a pluralist and tolerant one by equating religion with ethics. This, of course, was how Gandhi reacted against the specter of the “Hindu raj” and the cry of “Islam is in danger” that widened the communal gulf in India and created the climate of hatred between the Hindus and the Muslims. For Gandhi, the difference between the Hindus and the Muslims was not confined to religion. It was due, according to him, to the lack of truthfulness and transparency in the political realm. Therefore, as a social reformer, Gandhi believed strongly in the affinity between spirituality and politics. It is not surprising that he chose to work with individuals whose primary interests were best defined in spiritual and ethical terms. He once declared that a true Muslim could not harm a Hindu, and a true Hindu could not harm a Muslim.27 It was probably in this spirit that Gandhi developed a friendship and a great esteem for both 63

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Maulana Azad and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. In 1939, during his third visit to Ghaffar Khan, Gandhi proclaimed: If you dissect my heart, you will find that the prayer and spiritual striving for the attainment of Hindu-Muslim unity goes on there unceasingly all the twenty-four hours without even a moment’s interruption whether I am awake or asleep. . . . The dream [of Hindu-Muslim unity] has filled my being since the earliest childhood.28 Gandhi was certainly influenced by the tolerant Islam of Ghaffar Khan and Maulana Azad and their non-fanatical reading of the Qur’an, but it is also true that the spiritual teachings of the Mahatma and his political pragmatism captivated the minds of these two men. Azad was “the Muslim on whom Gandhi relied for advice” and was “a prominent example of the communal inclusiveness of Congress”.29 In this respect Gandhi’s friendships and disputes with Indian Muslim leaders remains deeply instructive for the understanding of his critique of religious fanaticism. Gandhi required Muslims to recognize that Islam like any other religion was neither the whole truth nor nothing but the truth. That is why Gandhi rejected the idea that there was one privileged path to God and he encouraged inter-religious dialogue, so that individuals could see their faith in the critical reflections of another. One of his notable innovations was the inter-faith prayer meeting, where texts of different religions were read and sung to a mixed audience. Reading Gandhi today as a critique of religious violence helps us to problematize Gandhi’s nonviolence against forms of religious fanaticism and communalism. In other words, in order to develop a religious approach to nonviolence that is dialogical and pluralistic, one needs to become fully conscious of the fact that unity between different religious communities depends on the practice of mutual understanding and inter-faith learning. Gandhi’s approach to the problem of Hindu-Muslim relations in India was based on the view that it is not an ingrained and ineradicable enmity. Gandhi, it hardly needs to be repeated, believed in a plural political and religious society. Therefore, his vision of communal harmony and his critique of religious fanaticism went hand in hand with his theory of participative democracy and shared sovereignty. He wrote: “Mutual respect for one another’s religion is inherent in a peaceful society. Free impact of ideas is impossible on any other condition. Religions are meant to tame our savage 64

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nature, not to let it loose.”30 Thus it could be said that, in the case of Gandhi, religious pluralism and struggle against fanaticism was not of mere political agenda, but a matter of faith in the dynamism and potentiality of the Indian society to tackle the evil of communalism at the structural and mental levels.

Acknowledgment This lecture is a revised version of the lecture “Gandhi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan: A Critique of Religious Fanaticism”, delivered at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, February 2011.

Notes 1 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Young India, June 1921, p. 170. 2 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Harijan, 1 January 1937. 3 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. VII, New Delhi: Publications Divisions, Government of India, 1958– 1994, p. 338. 4 Bose, N.K., Selections From Gandhi, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publications, 1957, p. 25. 5 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Young India, March 1925, quoted in Datta, M.D., The Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1953, p. 30. 6 Quoted in Kripalani, Krishna (ed.), All Men Are Brothers, Paris: UNESCO, 1969, p. 62. 7 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Gandhi and Communal Problems, compiled by Pradip Pachpinde, Bombay: Centre for Study of Society and Secularism, 1994, p. 5. 8 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Collected Works, Vol. 2, p. 52 quoted in McDonough, Sheila, Gandhi’s Response to Islam, New Delhi: D.K. Print World, 1994, p. 17. 9 Gandhi, Rajmohan, op. cit., p. 75. 10 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Collected Works, Vol. 10, p. 370 quoted in McDonough, Sheila, Gandhi’s Response to Islam, op. cit., pp. 28–29. 11 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Young India, 5 March 1925. 12 Interview with Dr John Mott, Young India, 21 March 1929. 13 McDonough, Sheila, Gandhi’s Response to Islam, op. cit., p. 39. 14 Brown, Judith M., Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 140. 15 Gandhi to Chelmsford, 29 April 1918, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 14, p. 377. 16 Quoted by Gandhi, Rajmohan, op. cit., p. 245. 17 See Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, edited by Anthony Parel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 42.

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18 Qureishi, Naeem M., Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 1918–1924, Leiden: Brill, 1999, p. 104. 19 Young India, 1924–1926, 1327, quoted by Qureishi, Naeem M., PanIslam in British Indian Politics, op. cit., p. 104. 20 Gandhi, Rajmohan, op. cit., p. 252. 21 Brown, Judith M., Gandhi, p. 175. 22 Quoted in Sayid, M.H., Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Lahore: Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, 1945, pp. 264–265. 23 Quoted in Sherwani, L.A. (ed.), Pakistan Resolution to Pakistan, Karachi: National Publishing House Limited, 1969, p. 78. 24 Das, Durga, From Curzon to Nehru and Afterwards, London: Collins, 1969, p. 353. 25 Karandikar, M.A., Islam in India’s Transition to Modernity, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1968, preface, p. VII. 26 See Rauoof, A.A., Meet Mr. Jinnah, Lahore: Ashraf, 1944, p. III. 27 See Bhana, Surendra and Vahed , Goolman H., The Making of a Political Reformer: Gandhi in South Africa 1893–1914, New Delhi: Manohar, 2005, p. 143. 28 Tendulkar, D.G., Abdul Ghaffar: Khan Faith Is a Battle, Bombay: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1967, p. 291. 29 Brown, Judith M., Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 309. 30 Quoted in Iyer, Raghavan (ed.), The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 374.

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7 GANDHI AND THE KHILAFAT

Gandhi’s arrival in 1915 on the political scene of India was of great political significance to the growth of Indian political consciousness. On his return to India, Gandhi’s increasingly involvement with the Khilafat movement helped him secure a political authority in the Indian Congress and a strong legitimacy in the eyes of the British Raj. The colonial and anti-Indian policies of British Raj followed by the practice of military violence against Indian citizens had helped to aggregate many different political forces which played a historical in the making of the Indian independence. Among these, the Khilafat movement helped to build the solidarity among the Hindus and the Muslims against His Majesty’s government. The genesis of the movement can be traced in the allegation of the Muslim leadership that the British Government had broken the “solemn” promise given to them during the War by no less a person than Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, who declared in January 1918 that the Empire ruled by the Turkish Caliphate would not be disintegrated after the Allied victory if Indian Muslims extended their co-operation and loyalty to His Majesty’s Government by enlisting in large numbers for service in the British army. The Indian Muslims had kept their word and they had pinned their hope on the British Prime Minister’s promise. However, when victory came, the British Government broke its word on a strange excuse. This greatly affected the loyalty of the Muslims.1 The Muslim anger over the dismemberment of the Caliphate in Turkey was not so popular and well organized during actions beginning in 1919, since many among the Indian Muslims did not feel concerned 67

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with what was happening in Turkey. But the long delay in the preparation of the Peace Treaties after the end of the World War allowed time for the incubation and consolidation of the Khilafat movement and the rise of anti-British sentiments among the Muslims. As a result, what was considered in 1919 by many Indian Muslims as a “Turkish question” turned into an “Indian question”. In his speech delivered in Paris on 21 March 1920, the Indian Muslim leader and scholar Moulana Mohammad Ali stated: “It is not that we have come here to save any territories . . . any financial resources . . . We have come to you . . . to help us in preserving the sanctity of our soul. This question . . . is not merely a Turkish question. It is . . . an Indian question.”2 Thus came into existence the All-India Khilafat conference and the leaders of the movement called upon all faiths and communities to observe 17 October 1919 as the Khilafat Day. This occasion was marked by all forms of agitation and protest organized by the Muslims, Parsees, Sikhs and the Hindus. Overwhelmed with the national sentiments of the people and the Hindu-Muslim entente, Mahatma Gandhi decided to call upon the people to join the Khilafat movement and to cease their loyalty to an unjust and oppressive government. In an article written in Young India on 22 October 1919, Gandhi declared: The 17 October will be long remembered as a great day in Indian history . . . People have come to realize that not by violence but by peaceful combination and sustained effort are great causes to be won. As soon as the people ceased to fear force, so soon will Government find it to be useless. Oppression ceases when people cease to be afraid of the bayonet.3 Evidently, Gandhi’s sympathy for the Khilafatists was more than a simple fellowship, since he was trying to invite the Muslim leaders to join his satyagraha and adopt nonviolence. Moreover, by joining the Khilafat movement Gandhi wanted to consolidate the fraternization of Hindus and Muslims. As such, two years later in response to Maganlal, who was troubled by Gandhi’s involvement with Muslims, he wrote: “If I had not joined the Khilafat movement, I think, I would have lost everything. In joining it I have followed what I especially regard as my dharma . . . I am uniting Hindus and Muslims.”4 Anthony Parel points out that in Hind Swaraj Gandhi employs dharma as an ethical equivalent for mutual assistance.5 This, of course, was how Gandhi had approached the Muslim leaders in the Khilafat movement. 68

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Thus, the Khilafat movement and Gandhi’s non-cooperation satyagraha turned into a powerful political atmosphere because it reflected an enthusiastic fraternization of Hindus and Muslims in India. As such, Gandhi’s success in gaining the confidence of the Muslims was attained by supporting at the same time Pan-Islamism and Indian nationalism. As a matter of fact, driven by pragmatism both Gandhi and Abdul Bari [one of the most influential Pan-Islamist leaders of the Khilafat movement] were trying to utilize each other to their mutual advantage. Gandhi exploited the Khilafat to gain Muslim support and through them the leadership of a united India.6 Moreover, through his union with the Khilafat movement, Gandhi wanted to guarantee the matter of cow protection in the Indian Muslim community. That is why, he “treated the Khilafat as a ‘Kamadhuk’, the mythical cow that gave whatever one asked of her.”7 Later Gandhi explained: “I have been telling Maulana Shaukat Ail [sic for Ali] all along that I was helping him to save his cow, i.e. the Khilafat, because I hoped to save my cow thereby.”8 Not surprisingly, the Ali Brothers and many other leaders of the Khilafat movement promised on behalf of the Indian Muslims that when India wins independence, one of the regulations would be the prohibition of cow slaughter. Therefore, “as a gesture toward Hindus, Muhammad Ali stopped eating beef; departing from age-old practice, numerous Muslim homes celebrated Eid without beef.”9 Gandhi’s emergence as a strong politically allied and an inspirational leader in the Khilafat movement was not, however, a simple matter of a great number of Muslims being converted to his nonviolent style of action. The Ali Brothers were never totally converted to nonviolence. As for Abdul Bari: Gandhi’s support meant the strengthening of the Khilafat movement and perhaps personal fame as the Shaikhul-Islam of the Subcontinent. For this he was prepared to modify his earlier stance and preach cow protection even at the risk of inviting condemnation from certain quarters.10 As it was said before, the changed outlook on a Hindu-Muslim rapprochement under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi united many of the ideologues of the Pan-Islamic thought like Abul Kalam Azad, 69

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Syed Ameer Ali etc. around the Gandhian program of Swaraj. This is how Kalam Azad describes the meeting of the Muslim leaders of the Khilafat with Gandhi in his book India Wins Freedom: The question now arose about the next step. A meeting was held in which Mr. Mohammad Ali, Mr. Shaukat Ali, Hakim Ajmal Khan and Maulvi Abdul Bari of Firangi-Mahal, Lucknow were also present. Gandhiji presented his programme of non-cooperation. He said that days of deputations and memorials were over. We must withdraw all support from the Government and this alone would persuade the Government to come to terms. . . . I said without a moment’s hesitation that I fully accepted the programme. If people really wanted to help Turkey, there was no alternative to the programme sketched by Gandhiji.11 Gandhi knew about the depth of Muslim feelings over Pan-Islamist questions before returning to India. However, it was not until April 1919 that he decided to widen the circle of his Muslim friends through Dr. Ansari, the president of the Central Bureau for the Help of the Muslim Internees. Consequently, Gandhi’s writings and speeches became profuse with references to the Khilafat movement and gradual withdrawal of Muslim cooperation with His Majesty’s government. The adoption of progressive stages in the non-cooperation programme by the Khilafatists was intended to parry objections that anything, which might bring destruction to Muslims, was prohibited in Islam. But however vague the scheme was at this stage, it was a momentous decision and a landmark in the history of the Khilafat movement and indeed of India.12 However, despite the upsurge of the national feeling mixed with a grand dose of religious fundamentalism among the Indian Muslim community, Gandhi remained worried about the possibility of Muslims exercising violence during the non-cooperation campaign. “But in the event of their own shortcomings, and government vigilance, the Khilafatists had to content themselves with trying out the Gandhian prescription of nonviolent cooperation.”13 The spectacular manner in which the idea of independence spread across the Khilafat movement indicated the depth of Muslim resentment against the British rule. A deeper analysis of the historical role of 70

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the Khilafat movement and its relation with Mahatma Gandhi shows us clearly that, on many occasions, the theme of the destruction of the enemies of Islam remained stronger among the Muslim leaders than the Gandhian nonviolence. As such, “a good number of leaders was evidently tired of nonviolence and wished to precipitate a direct clash with the government.”14 Moreover, it was unacceptable for Gandhi to see the movement inclining towards violence. Not only, “there was a constant tussle between Gandhi and the militant Khilafatists over violence and nonviolence, as well as over the question of civil disobedience,”15 but also the unity of purpose which brought Gandhi and the Khilafatists together did not last very long. Let us not forget that the Hindu-Muslim entente to which the political agitation owed much of its strength was essentially a combination of parties whose real aims were divergent. This unity had never been more than superficial and cracks had appeared even in the midst of the non-cooperation fervor in 1921. Causes such as the Hindu fears of an Afghan invasion and a possible Muslim domination, the Muslim apprehensions of Hindu predominance after the attainment of swaraj, the ever-disputed question of cow-killing, clashes during the religious festivals and celebrations, playing of music before the mosques, all combined to widen the breach.16 By 1926, the outbreak of communal riots in India made the situation for the Khilafatists and Gandhi worse. “Anti-Hinduism assumed such proportions in the annual session of the Khilafat committee held on 8 May 1926 that when Moulana Mullick used the word ‘brethren’ for the Hindus in his speech, he was shouted down by the audience.”17 Gandhi’s deliberate attachment to the Muslims and the Khilafat movement had helped him in reaching broader groups in Indian society and rising as a non-elitist leader in the Congress. However, the main line of division between Gandhi and the Khilafat leaders was that of the approval and practice of violence by Indian Muslims. “The Muslim violence on the Malabar coast and the incipient violence of the extremer Khilafat leaders generated fear and resentment in other communities.”18 Many Muslim leaders like Shuakat Ali or Jinnah refused to accept nonviolence as a moral absolute though they accepted it as a temporary strategic device to overcome the British. Not surprisingly, the failure of the Khilafat movement to institutionalize itself into a permanent political party with a strategy of its own left an indelible 71

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mark on the relation of Mahatma Gandhi and the All India Muslim Conference and later the All India Muslim League represented by Mohamad Ali Jinnah. Jinnah was among the Muslim leaders of the Congress Party who in 1915 welcomed Gandhi on his return from South Africa, but the variations on the non-cooperation campaign produced certainly some early divergences between the two men. Jinnah, whose opposition to Gandhi’s non-cooperation was well known to the British and to other members of the Congress Party, was especially perplexed by the fact that, by 1920, the Congress, like most of Muslim India, had accepted Gandhi as their charismatic leader. “Your methods have already caused split and division in almost every institution that you have approached hitherto,” proclaimed Jinnah: and in the public life between Hindus and Hindus and Muslims and Muslims and even fathers and sons; people generally are all over the country and your extreme programme has for the moment struck the imagination mostly of the inexperienced youth and the ignorant and the illiterate. All this means complete disorganization and chaos. What the consequence of this may be, I shudder to contemplate. . . . I do not wish my countrymen to be dragged to the brink of a precipice in order to be shattered.19 In the final analysis one can contend that the Khilafat movement, in spite of its limitations and contradictions, had succeeded to resist the pressures of Jinnah’s Muslim League in the first years of its making. Nevertheless, the growing dissension within the Khilafat organizations, including Jinnah’s suspicions concerning Gandhi’s leadership, contributed to the decline of the movement. To make matters worse, the rumors of an embezzlement in the Khilafat organizations in the summer of 1922 and the communal tangle gave a serious blow to the movement. The Khilafat movement entered its final phase when, on 24 July 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne was signed. “It marked the beginning of the end of the Indian Muslim agitation against the British until the abolition of the caliphate by Ankara in March 1924 took the wind out of its sails.”20 As a result, the pragmatist camp of the Khilafatists came to believe that Indian Muslims should go on with Gandhi’s noncooperation campaign. But by November 1923 Jinnah and his Muslim League, which previously had been pushed into the background, were returning to Indian politics with the bitter reality of confronting the 72

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Khilafatists to surrender the leadership of the Muslim community. As a result, the Khilafat movement, which was built up into a fine edifice of Hindu-Muslim unity, ceased to be a mass All-India movement and was now a wholly Muslim party. As time passed, the shadow of Gandhi on the Khilafat movement grew thinner while Jinnah’s domination over the Muslim community became more effective. Though some of the Khilafatists believed that the movement had outlived its usefulness, the Ali brothers, mortified at having lost face by the abolition, discouraged by the disappearance of their most appealing political issue, and frustrated by their inability to rally a popular following once again, grew increasingly resentful of the Turks’ dirty trick. They refused to accept the deposition of Abdul Mejid, and vented their wrath on Mustafa Kemal.21 The decision made by the Ali brothers to champion Ibn Saud’s Wahabism and the sudden death of Abdul Bari in 19 January 1926 had the effect of splitting the Khilafat Committee into two hostile factions: one supporting the Hashimites and the other following the Wahabis. Also, much to the consternation of the Congress Muslims, including Abul Kalam Azad who had only just set out the political agenda for his co-religionists at Ramgarh, Jinnah talked of “two nations”, of Muslims having “their homelands, their territory and their state”. Refuting the theory of a plural, composite nationhood, which was advocated with such tenacity by Ajmal Khan, Ansari and Azad, Jinnah argued that it was a “dream” for Hindus and Muslims to evolve a common nationality. They belonged to “two different civilizations which are based on conflicting ideas and competition”. To yoke together two such “nations” under a single State “would lead to growing dis-content, and the final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a State.”22 It is true that Gandhi’s Congress-Khilafat non-cooperation movement was partly responsible for Jinnah’s skepticism and bitterness, but it goes also without saying that Jinnah’s political style and the exaggerated “Britishness” that he adopted in his private and public life left him little opportunity to compete with Gandhi’s simplicity and 73

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transparency. It is absolutely clear that Jinnah’s dream of an independent India did not go hand in hand with the Hindu-Muslim unity. Generally speaking, though Jinnah pleaded for the Muslim cause before the Congress and the Hindu community through the years 1916 to 1938, he gradually gave up the idea of Hindu-Muslim unity and advocated the exclusive cause of Muslim India in the decade before the Independence. Jinnah’s correspondence with Pandit Nehru in 1938 bears clear testimony that Jinnah had reached a dead-end in his dealings with some of the leaders of the Congress. For Gandhi, the questions of Indian home rule and the Hindu-Muslim unity were not separate issues, whereas for Jinnah the opposite was true as he mentioned in response to Gandhi: We maintain and hold that Muslims and Hindus are two major nations by any definition or test of a nation. We are a nation of a hundred million, and what is more, we are a nation with our own distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, names and nomenclature, sense of values and proportion, legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions, aptitudes and ambitions, in short we have our own distinctive outlook on life and of life. By all canons of international law we are a nation.23 Jinnah strongly resented relating the swaraj movement in favor of Khilafat. He was, in the words of Durga Das, “Amazed that the Hindu leaders had not realized that this movement would encourage the Pan-Islamic sentiment.”24 Gandhi, however, saw in Khilafat an opportunity to seek Muslim cooperation in the swaraj movement. His political intentions in doing so were more democratic than theocratic. It would be wrong, therefore, to underline, as some analysts of Indian contemporary political history do, that Gandhi was “unwittingly responsible for jettisoning sane, secular, modernist leadership among the Muslims of India and foisting upon Indian Muslims, a theocratic orthodoxy of the Maulvis.”25 Jinnah, like Ambedkar, criticized Gandhi’s insistence on the spiritualization of Indian politics. He was against Gandhi’s view of bringing religious issues into the public sphere, because he considered it disastrous and irrelevant for political matters in India. Jinnah himself, however, prioritized religion, since he was considered as a “communalist” by many of his critics.26

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In other words, in his long political career, Muhammad Ali Jinnah clearly perceived Indian self-determination in the framework of the Muslim community. Poised to scale political heights he fell and suffered disappointment. Gandhi’s Congress-Khilafat non-cooperation movement, which was inimical to his constitutionalist style, was partly responsible for this eclipse, but perhaps as important was the shift that the dyarchical provincial councils effected in Muslim politics.27 Though a secular liberal to the core in his public life, Jinnah’s strong political standing represented him in the Indian Muslim national consciousness as the personification of Muslims’ sense of persecution by the Congress. As for Gandhi, it was quite the opposite. Ever since his first writings in South Africa, Gandhi replaced the divisive view of religion by a pluralist and tolerant one by equating religion with ethics. This, of course, was how Gandhi reacted against the specter of the “Hindu raj” and the cry of “Islam is in danger” that widened the communal gulf in India and created the climate of hatred between the Hindus and the Muslims. For Gandhi, the difference between the Hindus and the Muslims was not confined to religion. It was due, according to him, to the lack of truthfulness and transparency in the political realm. Therefore, as a social reformer, Gandhi believed strongly in the affinity between spirituality and politics. It is not surprising that he chose to work with individuals whose primary interests were best defined in spiritual and ethical terms. He once declared that a true Muslim could not harm a Hindu, and a true Hindu could not harm a Muslim.28 It was probably in this spirit that Gandhi developed a friendship and a great esteem for both Maulana Azad and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. In 1939, during his third visit to Ghaffar Khan, Gandhi proclaimed: If you dissect my heart, you will find that the prayer and spiritual striving for the attainment of Hindu-Muslim unity goes on there unceasingly all the twenty-four hours without even a moment’s interruption whether I am awake or asleep. . . . The dream [of Hindu-Muslim unity] has filled my being since the earliest childhood.29

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Maulana Azad’s support of the Hindu-Muslim unity was in direct relation with his treatment of the Khilafat question in connection with Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. Consideration of Azad’s attempts to support Hindu-Muslim unity and the Khilafat movement on the basis of the Quran and Sunna supports the verdict that Azad “never succeeded in evolving from within Islam a political doctrine which could justify composite nationalism.” His real basis for composite Indian nationalism was his knowledge of Indian Muslim history and his practical estimate of what would be best for the future of Indian Muslims.30 As such Maulana Azad will not only be remembered in the history of India for the role he played in the national liberation movement of the country, but he will also be considered as a Muslim leader who stood for a dialogue among Muslims and Hindus. And yet, Azad started his career of politician and activist as a revivalist Muslim and as an upholder of pure Islam. His early career from 1906 to 1920 was influenced by his religious teachings. During this period Azad firmly believed that the Muslims were the leaders of the world. In his early writings and speeches which appeared in his journal Al-Hilal, Azad talked about the superiority of Muslims over the followers of other religions and called for an “Islamic Way” to independence. After 1920 a radical change appeared in the views of Maulana Azad and he ceased to be a revivalist Muslim and embraced Indian secular nationalism as a political philosophy. The evolution of Azad’s outlook from Pan-Islamic to secular nationalist, with no doubt, was determined by his friendship and collaboration with Mahatma Gandhi and by the rise of the communal problems in the Indian liberation movement. Like Gandhi, Azad considered Hindu-Muslim unity as a necessary principle for the national reconstruction of India. In his famous address to the Agra session of the Khalifat Conference on 25 August 1921, he referred to Hindu-Muslim unity as a moral imperative for the future of India. He proclaimed: If the Muslims of India would like to perform their best religious and Islamic duties . . . then they must recognize that it is obligatory for the Muslims to be together with their Hindu

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brethren . . . and it is my belief that the Muslims in India cannot perform their best duties, until in conformity within the injunctions of Islam, in all honesty, they establish unity and cooperation with the Hindus.31 Cooperation with Hindus was also a part of Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s practical philosophy. “Abdul Ghaffar kept himself severely aloof from all activities of a narrow communal type and refused to be drawn into the surging communal passions.” He “was greatly attracted to Gandhi and his programme but shyness and desire to keep in the background made him keep away from Gandhi. . . . Action was necessary to achieve anything and Gandhi had proposed a remarkable way of peaceful action which appealed to him.”32 Abdul Ghaffar Khan came up with the idea of a nonviolent army of Pashtuns called the Khudai Khidmatgars – or Servants of God. Gandhi and Khan shared a vision of secular India where both Hindus and Muslims would live together in harmony and peace. While Gandhi and Ghaffar Khan desperately sought to preserve communal peace, Jinnah disagreed with the Gandhian way of seeking unity and independence and, thus, looked down upon Gandhi’s support for the Khilafat Movement. As we know, Jinnah’s suspicion and bitterness towards a Hindu Congress Party continued up to the time of the Partition. Not surprisingly, Jinnah and his followers dismissed Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his Khudai Khidmatgars for the future of Pakistan. Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Gandhi met for the last time on 27 July, seven months before Gandhi’s assassination. Before Ghaffar Khan’s return to his province. “Gandhi told him his duty lay there ‘to make Pakistan really pak, pure.”33 After the Partition no one heard from Abddul Ghaffar Khan. He was a victim of persecution in Pakistan. As such, the two-nation theory, based on the erroneous belief that Hindus and Muslims constitute separate entities with no shared values, turned into a political initiative towards the creation of a separate Muslim homeland. Moreover, the Khilafat movement did not succeed in forging a permanent Hindu-Muslim inter-faith dialogue in India. Nevertheless, the social and political structures which developed during the Khilafat movement provided the strategies and the leaders for the development of anticolonial nationalist movements in the Indian subcontinent in the years after its disintegration.

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Acknowledgment This chapter is a revised version of the lecture “Gandhi and the Khilafat”, delivered at York University, Toronto, January 2017.

Notes 1 Choudhary, Sukhbir, Indian People Fight for National Liberation: NonCo-operation, Khilafat and Revivalist Movements, 1920–22, New Delhi: Srijanee Prakushan, 1972, pp. 216–217. 2 Ibid., p. 217. 3 Ibid., p. 221. 4 Quoted by Gandhi, Rajmohan, op. cit., p. 245. 5 See Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, edited by Anthony Parel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 42. 6 Ibid., p. 71. 7 Qureishi, Naeem M., Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 1918–1924, Leiden: Brill, 1999, p. 104. 8 Young India, 1924–1926, 1327, quoted by Qureishi, Naeem M., PanIslam in British Indian Politics, op. cit., p. 104. 9 Gandhi, Rajmohan, op. cit., p. 252. 10 Ibid., p. 72. 11 Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam, India Wins Freedom, New Delhi: Orient Longmans, 1959, p. 9. 12 Qureishi, Naeem M., Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 1918–1924, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 91–92. 13 Ibid., p. 172. 14 Ibid., p. 229. 15 Ibid., p. 238. 16 Ibid., pp. 261–262. 17 Choudhary, Sukhbir, Indian People Fight for National Liberation, op. cit., p. 381. 18 Brown, Judith M., Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, op. cit., p. 175. 19 Quoted in Sayid, M.H., Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Lahore: Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, 1945, pp. 264–265. 20 Qureishi, Naeem, M., Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics, op. cit., 2009, p. 277. 21 Minault, Gail, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 205. 22 Hassan, Mushirul (ed.), India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993, Introduction, p. 26. 23 Quoted in Sherwani, L.A. (ed.), Pakistan Resolution to Pakistan, Karachi: National Publishing House Limited, 1969, p. 78. 24 Das, Durga, From Curzon to Nehru and Afterwards, London: Collins, 1969, p. 353.

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25 Karandikar, M.A., Islam in India’s Transition to Modernity, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1968, preface, p. VII. 26 See Rauoof, A.A., Meet Mr. Jinnah, Lahore: Ashraf, 1944, p. III. 27 Moore, R.J., “Jinnah and the Pakistan Demand”, in Hassan, Mushirul (ed.), India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 162. 28 See Bhana, Surendra and Vahed , Goolman H., The Making of a Political Reformer: Gandhi in South Africa 1893–1914, New Delhi: Manohar, 2005, p. 143. 29 Tendulkar, D.G., Abdul Ghaffar Khan: Faith Is a Battle, Bombay: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1967, p. 291. 30 Douglas, Ian Henderson, Abul Kalam Azad: An Intellectual and Religious Biography, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 178. 31 Khan, Rasheedudin, “Portrait of a Great Patriot: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958)”, in Grover, Verinder (ed.), Political Thinkers of India, Vol. 17, New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications, 1992, pp. 208–209. 32 Tendulkar, D.G., Abdul Ghaffar Khan, op. cit., pp. 48, 35. 33 Ibid., p. 448.

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8 THE GANDHIAN VISION OF DEMOCRACY

Gandhian nonviolence has captured the attention of many civic actors and democratic theorists around the world for more than half a century. Yet, the Gandhian vision of democracy is still missing tragically in most of the Western debates on democratic theory. But it is time for the comparative and inter-cultural democratic theory to open up to the Gandhian legacy of democratic thought and ask questions about its relevance for our political world which is suffering from a crisis of democratic passion and democratic leadership. How does Gandhi understand democracy? In which way his alternative model of democracy differs from the well-known liberal view of representative democracy? Could he provide us today with an original response to the shortcomings of neo-liberalism in our world? All these questions need to be discussed in relation to Gandhi’s admiration for what can be called the “integral democracy” and his critic of its liberal weaknesses in the West. In Gandhi’s “integral democracy”, there would be no representative government, no capitalist greed and certainly no social and political hierarchy. In many ways, Gandhi’s advocacy of citizenship duty and his insistence on ethical renewal of democracy in terms of character building (people leadership) and enlightened citizenship (democratic passion) is first and foremost a response to what he took to be certain enduring tensions between spirituality and politics and individual and State in Western liberal political life. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and a companion of Gandhi in India’s movement for independence, reminds us that Gandhi was “delightfully vague” in his theory of State and government.1 However, some recent scholars on Mahatma Gandhi’s political thought place him firmly within the liberal camp.2 There are good reasons for this: Gandhi’s nonviolence embodies more famously than any other political theory the spirit of freedom and democratic individualism 80

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that seems to underpin modern liberalism. However, Gandhi’s insistence on ethical commitment in citizen politics, his critique of representative democracy and his practice of civil disobedience against unjust laws do not portray him as a typical liberal thinker. Modern liberal thought has been primarily considered as an economic sphere based on the play of laissez-faire and a political sphere founded on the idea of individual freedom and the separation of the private and the public. However, for Gandhi, an individual is not considered as a rational economic agent with particular wants and rights. Quite the contrary, Gandhi insists on the duties of individuals as moral agents rather than free agents pursuing their self-interests. Thus, the Gandhian conception of social and political life is directly opposed to the social, political and economic structures of the liberal thought. Consequently, Gandhi maintains democracy as a form of “shared sovereignty” rather than a political institution where people play a minimum role through representation and election. As such, Gandhi advocates democracy as a form of self-instituted society where ethics is a crucial yardstick in managing things. As a supporter of the Indian civilization and a critic of modern Western society, Gandhi offers us a model of ethical politics which is relatively rare in both Western and Eastern traditions of thought. Unlike Tagore, Coomaraswamy and Aurobindo, who schooled in the speculative metaphysics of the Indian gnostic tradition, Gandhi finds a balance between ethics, politics and spirituality and applies his moral standards of nonviolence and truth to all spheres of life. Therefore, the transformative dynamic of Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence provides a way for him to develop the idea of democracy from being a solely political problem to being essentially a potential ethical solution to the problems of injustice and inequality.

Democracy as an ethical solution Cherishing the dual role of a political thinker and a civic activist, Gandhi believes that it is indeed possible to reconcile his philosophy of nonviolence with the effective pursuit of what he called an “enlightened democracy”. Moreover, he develops his vision of a nonviolent democracy that represents the necessary condition of a responsible and truthful society. In other words, Gandhi argues that the path of democratic governance can be achieved without putting aside the ethical imperatives of nonviolence. The task before Gandhi is, therefore, clear. According to him, Indian democracy, if it has to have moral 81

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authority, cannot be based on violence and exclusivism. “Democracy and nonviolence can ill go together” says Gandhi. The states that are today nominally democratic have either to become frankly totalitarian or if they are to become truly democratic, they must become courageously nonviolent. It is a blasphemy to say that nonviolence can only be practised by individuals and never by nations which are composed of individuals.3 This key statement contains Gandhi’s own standards for the successful resolution of his synthesis between the inclusive principles of nonviolence and the practical realization of an integral democracy. The spirit behind Gandhi’s integral democracy and its translatability into pluralistic and pragmatic politics is the individualistic, deceptive and selfdestructive tendencies of modernity and liberal thought. This is well reflected in his first written book, Hind Swaraj, published in 1909, while he was still active as a lawyer and a civil activist in South Africa. We can consider Hind Swaraj as the philosophical foundation of Gandhi’s thinking and doing, but also a severe critique of the exclusive and unethical nature of modern civilization. To quote Gandhi, “This civilization takes note neither of morality, nor of religion. Its votaries . . . civilization seeks to increase bodily comfort.”4 Gandhi goes on to point out that the true civilization should be defined in terms of “good conduct” and “path of duty”. He writes: “Civilization is that mode of conduct which points.”5 As we can see, Gandhi does not criticize modern civilization because it is Western or liberal, but because it is exploitative and exclusionary. Therefore for Gandhi, in contradistinction to modern liberal civilization, true civilization goes hand in hand with true self-rule (Swaraj). Feeding on spiritual and cultural elements of India’s ancient civilization, Gandhi develops in Hind Swaraj his model of Indian nationhood, and what later becomes his conception of an inclusive and participative democracy, by referring to the idea of self-sufficient village communities and principles of solidaristic citizenship. As such, while Gandhi agrees with liberals in the appreciation of civil liberties, he differs from their acceptance of the Western superiority of modern liberalism. Therefore, Gandhi condemns the dark side of English liberal rule, i.e. colonialism, as the reverse of his conception of democratic rule. In other words, Gandhi’s conception of democratic rule does not correspond necessarily with the overthrowing of the British 82

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rule. For Gandhi what makes problem is not only the British rule, but the liberal spirit in the name of which Western civilization pretends to dominate Indian culture and society. Lord Bhikhu Parekh is a scholar who has gone into a detailed investigation of Gandhi’s critique of liberal State. His basic argument is this: Gandhi was convinced that the “rule” of British civilisation could continue even if the British government were to stop ruling over India and British capital to cease exploiting it. British imperialism was unacceptable not only because of its political and even economic but moral and cultural consequences.6 Gandhi’s critique of modern liberalism includes not only the lack of moral legitimacy of economic and political domination of India, but it also integrates a critique of a culture of passivity and conformity among Indians who submit to the materialist and body-center view of the West. In general terms, we can say that Gandhi focuses his attention on the spiritual content of civilization motivated by an operative method to conceive ethical and legal obligations as universal for all human beings. It is true that Gandhi’s spiritual vision of human civilization alienates him from liberal society that he is incapable to grasp its complexity. He, nevertheless, appropriates the theoretical achievements of modern liberalism but rejects as incomplete the very political institutions that generate and sustain it. That is why Gandhi tries to persuade his fellow Indians to concentrate their energies on the resurgence of traditional Indian values. In this relation, one needs to point out that Gandhi rarely uses a nationalist language to talk about Indianness. His support of Indianness has “nothing in common with the ethnic or even cultural nationalism of Tilak and Aurobindo, let alone such Hindu fundamentalists as Savarkar.”7 Moreover, the debate between Gandhi and Western liberal civilization is completed by his disavowing of the views of those Indians who in the words of Sunil Khilnanai either “chose to devise an ostentatiously ‘traditional’ self, [or] declared for a more stridently Western or modern one”.8 Gandhi’s entire democratic theory can, therefore, be understood as formulated around his commitment to an authentic expression of ethical politics and spiritual Indianness. However, “Gandhi always rejected the extremism of Hindu orthodoxy, but he too, was tremendously attracted to the notion that timeless truth resided in an ancient Indian civilization and its spiritual wisdom.”9 When one reads Hind Swaraj, one is explicitly and permanently referred to 83

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the idea of India’s moral superiority exemplified by the two concepts of “kama” (avoidance of pain) and “artha” (power) as “the proper objects of the active life”.10 It is in the context of the Indian mode of life and the traditional wisdom of his ancestors that Gandhi takes a critical view of the representative democracy. More importantly, he opposes the idea of the uniqueness and centrality of village governance (the Panchayat Raj) to that of a representative government and a centralized State. That is why the Gandhian view of democracy goes hand in hand with the idea of a minimal State. At the same time, he is aware of the fact that the democratic spirit can be restored in the shadow of a centralized power.

Critiquing governmentality This brings forth the need to reinterpret Gandhi’s critique of “governmentality” in the shadow of his reform of modern political theory in general. Gandhi is highly critical of the Western thinkers like Hobbes and Rousseau who see a close relationship between violence and social order. Unlike Hobbes for whom authority is a modern means of political legitimation, Gandhi criticizes the entire liberal approach to human governance by replacing the basic Hobbesian impulse of self-preservation by the idea of self-sacrifice. This makes Gandhi reject the principle of modern Statehood and search for moral foundations of power. Gandhi’s concept of governance is, therefore, that which governs the least. Gandhi liked to quote from H.D. Thoreau’s famous essay on Civil Disobedience, that “government is best that governs least, or not at all.”11 Like Thoreau, Gandhi believes that the spirit of democracy is at odds with liberal governance, because liberal institutions can produce laws that violate democratic principles. Thus, Gandhi does not recognize the moral authority of liberal unjust laws, though he accepts the fact that they are liberal. He, therefore, rejects the Hobbesian idea of “commonwealth” or the Rousseauist concept of “general will” which both tend to create an indivisible political community to which all are equally subject. Under the terms of Gandhian politics, authority and sovereignty are not derived from the law of preservation or that of that which involves a loss of liberty, because the State has no instrumental value in the making of the collective political entity. For Gandhi the only way to attain the ideal of democracy is through a self-sufficient and self-reliant community that he enunciates as “village swaraj”. As he says: 84

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My idea of village swaraj is that it is a complete republic, independent of its neighbors for its vital wants, and yet interdependent for many others in which dependence is a necessity. Thus every village’s first concern will be to grow its own food crops and cotton for its cloth. . . . As far as possible every activity will be conducted on the co-operative basis. There will be no castes such as we have today with their graded untouchability. Nonviolence with its technique of Satyagraha and non-cooperation will be the sanction of the village community. . . . The government of the village will be conducted by the Panchayat of five persons annually elected by the adult villagers, male and female, possessing minimum prescribed qualifications. Since there will be no system of punishment in the accepted sense, this Panchayat will be the legislature, judiciary and executive combined to operate for its year of office. Here is the perfect democracy based upon individual freedom. The individual is the architect of his own government. The law of nonviolence rules him and his government.12 So as we can see, on the basis of his decentralized approach to the question of politics and power, Gandhi’s democratic theory tries to bring the old system of village life in tune with the democratic value of self-government. Gandhi sees the necessity to cultivate internal self-government in order to reduce the external form of sovereignty and governmentality. This brings him to reverse the pyramid of authority and power in a way that the pursuit of individual rights follows the transformative self-rule. For Gandhi, then, democracy is primarily swaraj, the rule over oneself. As we can see, unlike many of his contemporary political and spiritual thinkers in India (Tagore, Aurobindo, Nehru etc.), Gandhi sets forth a theory of democracy that is related to a theory of the self. The recurrent theme in his theory of democracy is self-realization, self-restraint and self-discipline. In other words, for Gandhi, democracy cannot exist without an enlightened and self-conscious citizenship. Gandhi viewed “democracy disciplined and enlightened (as) the finest thing in the world”. But he adds: “A democracy prejudiced, ignorant, superstitious will land itself in chaos and be self-destroyed.”13 If this is the case, then we can say that from Gandhi’s point of view, democracy is autonomy as opposed to heteronomy. As Gandhi affirms: “It is swaraj when we learn to rule one selves.”14 But for Gandhi this self-rule is also a shared sovereignty, i.e., a capacity of self-governing with others. According to him, only such a 85

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self-governing community can protect individual freedom and regulate economic life and social relations based on justice. Thus, for Gandhi, democracy constitutes the interplay between multiple liberties and multiple interests based on shared ethical values. This becomes all the more obvious in Gandhi’s effort to transcend the dichotomy between private interests and public common good. This he does by enunciating a very novel idea of what he calls “spiritualization of politics”. It would be wrong to think, as some might say, that the introduction by Gandhi of spirituality into politics could violate the true nature of politics. Maybe because for Gandhi, politics does not arise from competition among political parties, but it is, on the contrary, the outcome of collaboration among citizens. In other words, politics is the pursuit of freedom through a conscious self-transforming act. This self-transforming act must be executed for the benefit of others and not in the sense of enclosing the self within ramparts of self-interest. As Gandhi says, “Action leads to bondage unless it is performed in a spirit of sacrifice. Sacrifice (Yajna) means exerting oneself for the benefit of others, in a word, service. And when service is rendered for service’s sake, there is no room for attachment, likes and dislikes.”15 For Gandhi, therefore, politics is based on the internalization of the otherness of the Other, which finds expression in and is supported by the self-institution of democracy. The vitality of this self-institution depends on a meaningful relationship between individuals and institutions. According to Gandhi: A dynamic democracy can grow only out of meaningful relationships and spontaneous organization that spring among people, when they come together at the local level to solve their basic problems by cooperation among themselves. In such a community achievement of self-sufficiency and security by neighbourly cooperation engenders a strong sense of local strength and solidarity, and the individual’s sense of responsibility to community and concern for its welfare are at their highest.16 We should note the emphasis that Gandhi puts on the two concepts of “solidarity” and “responsibility”. This is important because Gandhi challenges the idea of an externally imposed law. His conception of democracy is, thus, based on a process of self-government followed by a plea against centralization and the pyramidal principle of politics. Gandhi opts instead for a political principle that highlights the 86

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molding of structures which put an end to the split between civil society and political order. In this perspective, the Gandhian vision of democracy is also characterized by the inseparability of the private and the public and the self-transformation of the former in favor of the latter. In the Gandhian perspective of democratic governance there is a close correlation between the private and the public. As stated earlier, Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of democratic rule of the people is possible only if it is ensured by the way of “Gram Swarajya” (the management of the affairs by the people themselves). That is why Gandhi suggests, “The spirit of democracy requires the inculcation of the spirit of brotherhood.”17 And he adds that “democracy has to be built up inch by inch in economic, social and political life.”18 Furthermore, Gandhi insists on the moral purpose of democracy as an art of developing the sense of mobilization and disobedience to unjust laws among the people. Gandhi’s original contribution is his addition of the ethical conception of nonviolent disobedience of the law which has been overlooked in liberalism.

Moral obligation and civic duty From a Gandhian perspective, one of the shortcomings of liberal theory of democracy is its inability to incorporate the two dimensions of civil disobedience and nonviolent action within a comprehensive model of shared sovereignty that will not be completely subordinated to formal requirements of an idealized concept of right. As such, the axiomatic idea that informs Gandhi’s conception of civil disobedience is that of a radical response to the liberal separation of political and moral obligation. By pointing out that such a separation undermines disastrously the concept of individual duty and responsibility, Gandhi rejects rights-oriented liberalism as an insufficient theory of democracy and refuses to give individual rights a central role in our understanding of moral and political life. Gandhi’s principal problem with liberal democracy is its separation of rights and duties. According to him, by separating the “ought” from the “is”, politics loses its moral focus. In other words, from Gandhi’s point of view rights are dependent on duties. Therefore in order to claim their rights citizens need to fulfill their duties to themselves and others. Therefore, for Gandhi the notion of duty comes before that of rights, which is subordinate to the former. That is to say, a right is not effective by itself, but only relation to the duty to which it corresponds. The effective exercise of a right springs not from the individual who possesses it, but from his/her 87

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responsibility toward others. According to Gandhi, a right is recognized through the sense of duty toward others. As such, a right which goes separate from a duty is not worth very much. The performance appears, therefore, in Gandhi’s eyes as a requirement for a comprehensive conception of rights. “Every man has an equal right to the necessaries of life even as birds and beasts have,” writes Gandhi in Young India on 26 March 1931. And since every right carries with it a corresponding duty and a corresponding remedy for resisting any attack upon it, it is merely a matter of finding out the corresponding duties and remedies to vindicate the elementary fundamental equality. The corresponding duty is to labour with my limbs and the corresponding remedy is to non-cooperate with who deprives me of the fruit of my labour.19 Predictably the application of the principle of duty by Gandhi to the social, economic and political spheres brings him into sharp conflict with the traditional defenders of the liberal notion of rights and the notion that we are free and independent selves, un-determined by prior moral ties. Gandhi tries to secure rights in relation with the concept of “dharma” as social duty. As Anthony Parel suggests: There is a strong element of realism in Gandhi’s philosophy of dharma as duty . . . It recognizes the fact that history in significant part involves a struggle between duty and interest. The chances of duty gaining ascendancy over interest depend on virtue. Modern society, by contrast, has placed its bets on rights than virtue, which to Gandhi was a matter of deep concern. He wanted modern society to place equal emphasis on rights, duties and virtue.20 Therefore, Gandhi’s severe critique of the modern State brings him to notify us of the imperative relationship between the individual and the community in the sharing of moral and political responsibilities. It is in this sense that the Gandhian vision of democracy secures individual rights within the limits of practice of the soul force and not the brute force. In other words, for Gandhi, to be democratic is to be truthful to nonviolence, but at the same time assuming one’s duty to protect rights in relation to an original moral experience. Gandhi’s insight was that

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good governance is the right balance between a minimum democratic State and a vibrant society of citizens. He affirmed: I admit that there are certain things which cannot be done without political power, but there are numerous other things which do not at all depend upon political power. . . . This means that when people come into possession of political power, the interference with the freedom of the people is reduced to a minimum. In other words, a nation that runs its affairs smoothly and effectively without much state interference is truly democratic. Where such condition is absent, the form of government is democratic in name.21 Certainly, this might bring to mind the arguments of some of the European anarchists like Bakunin, Proudhon and Tolstoy. However, Gandhi gave little value to the violent thoughts of Bakunin and Proudhon, and though he was directly influenced by the spiritual thoughts of Tolstoy, he was more of a political theorist than him and thought pragmatically in terms of decentralized local polities in India. His use of the word “anarchy” is directly related to his understanding of Henry David Thoreau’s argument on minimal government. Writing in 1939, Gandhi calls this approach “Enlightened Anarchy”. He says: Political power, in my opinion, cannot be our ultimate aim. It is one of the means used by men and women for their allround advancement. The power to control national life through national representatives is called political power. Representatives will become unnecessary if the national life becomes so perfect as to be self-controlled. It will then be a state of enlightened anarchy in which each person will become her and his own ruler. He will conduct himself in such a way that his behaviour will not hamper the well-being of his neighbours. In an ideal State there will be no political institution and therefore no political power. That is why Thoreau has said in his classic statement that that government is the best which governs the least.22 This exposition suggests that in Gandhi’s ideal of democracy came together many of his core beliefs and arguments such as moral growth of the individual, the primacy of the spiritual in nonviolent action and the interdependence of all departments of life. But how did Gandhi

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expect these principles to work in everyday life? Gandhi had come to the conclusion that democracy, like any other aspect of social and political life, would not function in the framework of a meaningless civilization with no sense of ethics and spirituality. By spirituality, Gandhi understands freedom from illusion, possessiveness and prejudice. But he also approaches the spiritual in life as the unity of all being. Spirituality, therefore, is a necessary condition for swaraj, selfdiscipline and social responsibility. This is where the personal and the political join each other in Gandhi’s theory of democracy. “Swaraj of a people”, says Gandhi, “means the sum total of the swaraj (self-rule) of individuals. And such swaraj comes only from performance by individuals of their duty as citizens. In it no one thinks of his rights. They come, when they are needed, for better performance of duty.”23 Thus for Gandhi, democracy is the best expression of self-government as a form of civic awareness. He argues his case in these terms: Self-government depends entirely upon our internal strength, upon our ability to fight against the heaviest odds. Indeed, self-government which does not require that continuous striving to attain it and to sustain it is not worth the name. I have, therefore, endeavoured to show both in the word and deed, that, political self-government, that is, Self-government for a large number of men and women, is no better than individual self-government, and therefore, it is to be attained by precisely the same means that are required for individual selfgovernment or self-rule.24 As we can see, for Gandhi, the only way to sustain and reform the democratic order is through civic practices. However, in order to enlarge the work of the public sphere while narrowing down the individualistic and hedonistic inclinations of the individual in the private realm, Gandhi suggests redefining the concept of citizenship by the virtue of the duty of the citizens and their participation in the political community. For him, this experience of redefinition of the citizen as a duty-oriented citizen is a better way to defend the rights of the individual while rectifying the unequal balance of power in a democracy between the political elite and the weaker social groups and minorities. In other words, Gandhi’s idea of democracy is understood as a means to fulfill one’s civic duty as an individual participating in a community and as an end to be attained through nonviolent resistance to all forms of centralization of power.

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Gandhi and Western democratic theory This is where Gandhi’s conception of democracy becomes relevant and significant to contemporary democratic theory. However, many Western democratic theorists still see no need to read Gandhi. Despite the increasing concern with the study of non-Western traditions of contemporary democratic theory, the political philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi remains largely unknown in the Anglo-American world. Needless to say that Gandhi’s approach to politics in terms of “resistance” and “protest” beyond a conception of domination over others provides a potential antidote to the contemporary crisis of democracy. With this in mind, Gandhi can be said to be oriented towards reinventing politics as a capacity for self-realization and self-transformation of the society. The democratic process of society is in this sense conceived as a process of self-rule where community is a result of an ethical effort to limit and to surpass violence. The tension between the liberal concept of private liberties (in the manner a thinker like Benjamin Constant formulates it as the sphere of private life) and the public sphere of civic citizenship within the concept of self-rule has significant implications for contemporary democratic practice, but has been neglected in democratic theory. Democratic theorists have yet to explore thoroughly the distinction between the rule of the private over the self, and the rule of the citizen as a member of the collective over itself. This is where the Gandhian matrix of civic nonviolence exemplified by the idea of “swaraj” allows us to probe more deeply into an understanding and practice of democracy as self-rule. The concept of self-rule as presented in the works of Mahatma Gandhi offers the possibility of expressing the core aims of an integral democratic politics in a manner divorced from neo-Marxist or liberal theories of democracy. For Gandhi, democracy is an unfinished project by its very nature, and remains an unfinished project whatever the degree of its realization. This is because, from his point of view, no realization of democratic rule will be perfect. Also, he sees democracy as essentially a process: to be democratic is to be engaged in a process of democratization. Might one nevertheless say that a Gandhian vision of democracy requires the instauration of a civic culture that recognizes the importance and value of self-discipline and responsibility? Yes, certainly. And must this dimension of self-discipline and responsibility be paramount? Must it in the last instance take precedence over the private sphere of the individual? The answer to this question is not so certain, yet from Gandhi’s point of view such questions are the very ones that an integral

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and constructive democracy must grapple with. As Gandhi puts it, “Democracy disciplined and enlightened is the finest thing in the world. A democracy prejudiced, ignorant, superstitious will land itself in chaos and may be self-destroyed.”25

Acknowledgment This chapter is a revised version of the article “The Gandhian Vision of Democracy”, previously published in Democratic Theory (vol. 2, issue 2).26

Notes 1 Nehru, Jawaharlal, Towards Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru, New York: John Day, 1941, p. 76. 2 Chandrasekaran, B., The Forgotten Liberal Ideas of M.K. Gandhi, www. cobdencentre.org/2011/07/liberal-gandhi/ 3 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, All Men Are Brothers, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1960, p. 188. 4 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Hind Swaraj, edited by Anthony J. Parel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 37. 5 Ibid., p. 67. 6 Parekh, Bhikhu, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, London: MacMillan Press, 1989, p. 18. 7 Ibid., p. 194. 8 Khilnani, Sunil, The Idea of India, New York: Ferrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1997, p. 8. 9 Steger, B. Manfred, Gandhi’s Dilemma, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000, p. 95. 10 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Hind Swaraj, op. cit., Introduction, p. xlix. 11 Thoreau, Henry David, Civil Disobedience, first paragraph, Walden and Civil Disobedience, edited by Owen Thomas, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1966, p. 224. 12 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Village Swaraj, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1963, pp. 31–32. 13 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Young India, 30 July 1931. 14 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Hind Swaraj, op. cit., p. 73. 15 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Discourses on the Gita, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1960, p. 13. 16 Quoted in Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase, Vol. 2, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1958, p. 581. 17 The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 100 vols., New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2009, Vol. 19, p. 84. 18 Ibid., Vol. 89, p. 77. 19 Mark Lindley, “Gandhi on Corresponding Duties/ Rights”, Anasati Darshan, Vol. 2, July/December 2006.

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20 Parel, Anthony J., Gandhi’s Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 98. 21 CWMG, op. cit., Vol. 62, p. 92. 22 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Sarvodaya, January, 1939 in CWMG, Vol. 74, p. 380. 23 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Harijan, 25 March 1939. 24 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Young India, 1 December 1927. 25 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, All Men Are Brothers, op. cit., p. 188. 26 Jahanbegloo, Ramin. Published December 2015. www.berghahnjournals. com/view/journals/democratic-theory/2/2/democratic-theory.2.issue-2. xml accessed on 01 February 2018.

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CONCLUSION Gandhi and the Global Satyagraha

Seventy years after Gandhi’s death, opinions and view about his person and his nonviolent technique of struggle remain deeply divided. For some, he was a puritanical, conservative critique of modernity. For them he created and perpetuated unrealistic and confused ideas about economic development and technological progress. However, for his admirers, Gandhi was a man of spiritual truthfulness and democratic action, both at public and personal levels with a unique method of struggle that combined political pragmatism and ethical integrity. Some, among these admirers, evaluate Gandhi’s impact on human history as significant as that of Jesus, Buddha and Karl Marx. Thus, in the mind of many people, Mahatma Gandhi represents two different and contradictory characters. The first Gandhi is the political Gandhi who fought against British colonialism and is the father of the modern Indian Nation. This is the man whom Einstein lauded as “a leader of his people, unsupported by any outward authority, a politician whose success rests not upon craft nor mastery of technical devices, but simply on the convincing power of his personality”.1 The second Gandhi is the Ashramic Gandhi who is more of a mystic than a politician and uses fasting as a method of struggle, whom Tagore considered as the “Mahatma”, the “Great Soul”. To be sure, Gandhi certainly deserves the accolade as a courageous fighter, a deep thinker, and a great leader of men and ideas. But if anything, Mohandas K. Gandhi was a man of experimentation, who insisted on truth. Therefore, it should not come to us as a surprise that the literal meaning of “Satyagraha” is “asserting for truth”. One does not have to go far to find in Gandhi’s autobiography, entitled The Story of My Experiments with Truth, the idea that life was nothing but a spiritual experience with truth and a struggle against all forms of untruth and injustice. As such, Gandhi claims that his life was his 94

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message, simply because he extended his practice of Satyagraha to all walks of life. Gandhi, in short, was a leader looking for a spiritual cause. He found it, of course, in Satyagraha and, ultimately, in independence for India. During the key part of his life, Gandhi devoted a great deal of time explaining the moral and philosophical meanings of Satyagraha. In Gandhi’s value system, ahimsa occupied the first place. He wrote: Literally speaking ahimsa is non-killing. But to me it has a world of meaning and takes me into realms much higher, infinitely higher than the realm to which I would go, if I merely understood by ahimsa non-killing. Ahimsa really means that you may not offend anybody, you may not harbour an uncharitable thought even in connection with one who may consider himself to be your enemy. . . . For one who follows the doctrine of ahimsa, there is no room for an enemy, he denies the existence of an enemy. . . . If we return blow for blow, we depart from the doctrine of ahimsa.2 Gandhi, however, was aware of the fact that he needed a vehicle of civic struggle and mass action for his philosophy of ahimsa. While in South Africa, he launched his movement of disobedience, but he was not happy with the English name of “passive resistance” given to his Indian struggle. He, therefore, decided to call it Satyagraha. As Gandhi puts it, the principle of Satyagraha was coined before the word itself. According to him, I can now see that all the principal events of my life, culminating in the vow of Brahmacharya, were secretly preparing me for it. The principle called Satyagraha came into being before that name was invented. Indeed, when it was born, I myself could not say what it was. In Gujarati also we used the English phrase “passive resistance” to describe it. When in a meeting of Europeans, I found that the term “passive resistance” was too narrowly construed, that it was supposed to be a weapon of the weak, that it could be characterized by hatred, and that it could finally manifest itself as violence, I had to demur to all these statements and explain the real nature of the Indian movement. It was clear that a new word must be coined by the Indians to designate their struggle. But I could not for the life of me find out a new name, and therefore offered a nominal 95

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prize through Indian Opinion to the reader who made the best suggestion on the subject. As a result, Maganlal Gandhi coined the word “Sadagraha” (Sat = truth, Agraha = firmness) and won the prize. But in order to make it clearer I changed the word to “Satyagraha” which has since become current in Gujarati as a designation for the struggle.3 As such, under the leadership of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Satyagraha turned into an instrument of nonviolent public dissent and a pragmatic tool of the powerless against the powerful. However, in the eyes of Gandhi, while being an instrument of conflict resolution and civic protest, Satyagraha was also essentially spiritual. What Gandhi called the “soul force” was actually “firmness in truth” and a spiritual mode of conduct. Distinguishing Satyagraha from passive resistance, Gandhi suggested that the success of a Satyagrahi was because of the appeal to one’s own conscience. Apart from resistance to wrong-doing, Gandhi seems to explicitly assume a fundamental moral distinction between political dissent and Satyagraha. Gandhi viewed Satyagraha essentially as an ethical commitment and a constructive political action. For Gandhi the spiritual and the political were the same. Therefore, the struggle against the unjust laws was soul force to uplift others. He saw the emancipation of one as the emancipation of all. He maintained that it was the duty of each individual to transform himself/ herself by attempting to live following the principles of truth and nonviolence. In order to achieve this, one had to develop a spirit of selflessness and simplicity. Gandhi had a profoundly ethical view of life: he recognized neither the infallible authority of texts nor the sanctity of religious traditions, but he was also the foremost critic of modern politics and its authoritarian practices. That is to say, reading Gandhi today it is unavoidable to rethink politics as the relation between power and people and as a way of transcending the conventional liberal distinction between civil society and the State. It is a move towards a politics of the future, where solidarity of differences is not compromised by mere multiculturalism and democratic action is not limited by mere constitutionalism and representation. Working in this perspective, the Gandhian philosophy of Satyagraha finds the conventional meaning of power as incomplete, while problematizing democratic politics as a way of assigning a duty to citizens to be vigilant about the abuses of power by the State and to struggle against the concentration of power in civil society. On the social side, Gandhi envisioned an ideal society where 96

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justice is done “unto the last” and in which institutions aim to get the best out of man. The entire Gandhian thought in the realm of religion and politics also revolves round the establishment of a just society. Gandhi’s Satyagraha hinges on moral growth in man where an unrestricted individualism gives its place to a civic humanism. Similarly, while speaking on religion Gandhi wanted to develop certain qualities like fearlessness, non-possession and humility in man. The main aim was to restructure man to suit to nonviolent society. Gandhi’s repeated emphasis on service to human beings as the essence of religion is intertwined with his pluralistic understanding of humanity. In this pluralistic approach to the dialogue of cultures and faiths, Gandhi was far ahead of his time. Indeed, Gandhi’s politics of Satyagraha is still far ahead of our time, three generations after his death. Gandhi’s ideas evolved through experience from a highly simplistic view to more mature, sophisticated and relevant propositions. Gandhi was not a system builder. He was essentially a pathfinder towards social and individual goals. Therefore, Gandhi’s philosophy is neither utopian, nor eschatological. It is simply a critical view, which tells us what we need to do in order to go forward in the path of liberation from selfishness and injustice to selflessness and welfare of all. More importantly, Gandhi’s attachment to religion is limited. Religion for Gandhi is identified with ethics rather than theology. Therefore, most of Gandhi’s major concepts and methods of struggle, including Satyagraha, are not absolutist concepts. Gandhi believes that human destiny has constantly been on the move towards nonviolence. Gandhi was a person who pursued justice in all aspects of life and who encouraged others to join him in this pursuit. Perhaps the key factor in his struggle was the fact that he attempted to put his nonviolent convictions into practice far more radically than most of his contemporaries. Where did Gandhi get his main inspirations for this belief that beyond all their differences all human beings are good? Gandhi himself speaks of Indian influences, especially that of the Bhagavad Gita, a text that he nurtured throughout his life, and of non-Indian influences such as Tolstoy, Ruskin and Thoreau. Many may find it difficult to see all these figures and texts as true inspirations for a life of nonviolence. Yet the fact must be recognized that though Gandhi’s foremost inspirations are Hindu, he has shown the world how after conscientiously reading through other religious texts and original writers it is possible to find the true meaning of nonviolence that is relevant to our times. As such, his claim to have discovered a way of action that is valid for other cultures and nations gives 97

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to his nonviolence and concept of Satyagraha a universal significance that is inescapable in today’s world. Growing up as a child in the province of Gujarat where Jainism had a strong influence, Gandhi was constantly exposed through his pious mother to the Jain doctrine of ahimsa. Although Gandhi forged his philosophy of nonviolence on these same lines, his passionate search for Truth took him through the readings of Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You in 1894, Ruskin’s Unto this Last while on a journey in South Africa and Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience when he was a student in London. Gandhi’s experience of Satyagraha, therefore, is partly due to his exposure to these intellectual influences, but it is also a natural outcome of his commitment to a life of service and struggle for justice. Gandhi’s personal experience of discrimination in South Africa, including the incident where he was thrown out of a train at Maritzburg in spite of having a valid ticket, made him more sensitive to the cause of nonviolence. Gandhi was imprisoned on 10 January 1908 by South African authorities. During imprisonment, he wrote to his ailing wife Kasturba: I have sacrificed all in the Satyagraha struggle . . . I love you so much that even if you are dead, you will always be alive in me. I repeat what I have told you that I shall never marry again. You should depart with faith in God. . . . My struggle is not merely political; it is also a righteous struggle and is, therefore, entirely pure.4 As we can see, Gandhi’s vision of Satyagraha was far from being utopian. He considered it as a dynamic element in the ethical becoming of human civilization. Gandhi’s effort to bridge the religious divides between different faiths was matched in many ways by his reinterpretation of the fundamental Jain principle of the many-sidedness of truth. Gandhi does not reject traditions; he simply affirms what he considers to be authentic in them and thinks of bringing them together in the realization of a deeper truth. This enables him to maintain that it would not be possible to understand the concept of Truth without having some understanding of the tradition in which it is nurtured. Gandhi, therefore, speaks of ahimsa and Satya as two sides of the same coin. He explains this two-way movement in the following way: “When I look for Ahimsa, Truth says, ‘Find it through me.’ When I look for Truth, Ahimsa says ‘Find it through me.’”5 Gandhi equates nonviolence with 98

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the search for Truth and in his early attempt to define Satyagraha he mentions: “Satyagraha is literally holding on to Truth and it means, therefore, Truth-force.”6 From these words we can understand that truth seeking is a cardinal feature of Satyagraha. In other words, holding on to Truth necessitates the exclusion of violence to ensure the supremacy of the ethical over the political. This has to do with the fact that according to Gandhi the grasp of Truth is always fragmentary. What may appear as truth to one person will often appear as untruth to another person. But that need not worry the seeker. . . . What appears to be different truths are like apparently different leaves of the same tree. . . . Hence, there is nothing wrong in every man following Truth according to his own lights. Indeed, it is his duty to do so.7 To acknowledge the partiality of one’s own truth Gandhi finds some common elements among the diverse expressions of truth in different religions. The fact is that we are never in a position to have absolute knowledge of truth, and therefore we can never be absolute in our expression of God. That is why Gandhi believes that epistemic humility is needed in every religion. Gandhian humility negates claims to absolute power and emphasizes the need for dialogue with others. As such, political action is a way of discovering Truth by requiring a need for self-limiting applications of power and openness to the other. So, tolerance is a means to strive toward Truth, mainly because no one is born nonviolent, but everyone can become nonviolent by daily practice of Satyagraha. Gandhi’s pedagogy of relying on Satyagraha both as a philosophy of life and as a method of conflict resolution opened new practical dimensions to the identification of social issues and unjust social situations and structures and at the same time articulating nonviolent solutions both at the personal level and at the social level. As we can see, Satyagraha is not a theoretical construct but also a mode of direct action in the pursuit of moral-political truth. Gandhi provides us with a mode of action that will enable us to live with the plurality of ideas and values. Gandhi defined himself as “an essentially practical man dealing with practical political questions”.8 In 1938, he said to a group of missionaries: I could not be leading a religious life unless I identified myself with the whole of mankind and that I could not do unless 99

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I took part in politics. The whole gamut of man’s activities today constitutes an indivisible whole. . . . I do not know of any religion apart from activity. It provides a moral basis to all other activities without which life would be a maze of sound and fury signifying nothing.9 In the Satyagraha mode of conflict resolution, the refusal to eliminate the opponent but to bring both parties to realize a heightened reciprocity or moral interdependence is most important. Through Satyagraha, the victims of injustice not only seek justice, but also ensure social harmony. The Satyagrahi, therefore, assumes that his opponents are also capable of changing and emancipating from their selfdeceptive, truth-denying beliefs and actions. To quote Gandhi: “The basic principle on which the practice of non-violence rests is that what holds good in respect of oneself equally applies to the whole universe. All mankind in essence are alike. What is, therefore, possible for one is possible for everybody.”10 Hence, according to Gandhi, we must act in the public sphere on the basis of the assumption that there is a plurality of views and opinions. The result of this plurality would be a detachment from self through engagement with the other and a tolerance that allows both the inclusion of values and the more comprehensive idea of a rational-consensus model of truth. As Gandhi puts it: Even as a tree has a single trunk, but many branches and leaves, so is there one true and perfect Religion, but it becomes many, as it passes through the human medium. The one Religion is beyond all speech. Imperfect men put it into such languages as they can command, and their words are interpreted by other men equally imperfect. Whose interpretation is to be held the right one? Everybody is right from his own standpoint, but it is not impossible that everybody is wrong. Hence the necessity for tolerance, which does not mean indifference towards one’s own faith, but a more intelligent and purer love for it.11 As such, for Gandhi, the possibility of arriving at a rational consensus on truth and rightness in a given socio-historical context needs more than a simple effort of argumentative reasoning. We must, according to Gandhi, test the truth or rightness of nonviolence through direct action techniques such as acts of non-cooperation, acts of civil disobedience and constructive programs.

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Satyagraha worked in India because Gandhi underlined the general qualities of transformative nonviolence. Therefore, his ability to invoke Satyagraha as a transformative and emancipative philosophy was largely responsible for his success. Gandhi’s demonstration of the power of Satyagraha as an ethic of individual transformation could be considered as his greatest contribution to the precepts of the contemporary global nonviolent movement. Intriguingly, however, there is another important aspect of Satyagraha which makes it universally applicable as a method of action. In this regard, it is a common view to say that Satyagraha was conducted by a person like Gandhi who was brought up in a cultural setting familiar with the concept of selfsuffering and nonviolence. But it would be a mistake to judge the Gandhian Satyagraha in terms of cultural background. The recent history of nonviolent action around the world has shown us clearly that Satyagraha is a seed that can grow and flourish in other cultures and religions rather than the Hindu society. We can refer here to several successful experiences of Satyagraha in the past 50 years. Among the followers of Gandhi in the twentieth century who successfully launched their own Satyagraha against racial, religious and economic injustice and struggled for human rights, one could mention names like Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Benigno Aquino and Aung San Suu Kyi. In more than half a century, many around the globe have drawn inspiration from Gandhi’s method of Satyagraha. The trans-Indian experience of Satyagraha assumes, therefore, that nonviolence in its broadest sense remains exemplary as a political action and is transferable as a human experience from one tradition of thought to another. Satyagraha was already invoked during Gandhi’s lifetime by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, also known as the “Frontier Gandhi”. Few people know about Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan as a Muslim proponent of nonviolence who stressed the compatibility of Islam and Satyagraha. Unlike Gandhi, who was largely influenced by the Bhagavad Gita, the Sermon on the Mount, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan drew his primary inspirations from the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad. As such, he started elaborating his principles of nonviolence and social reform before he came into contact with Gandhi. Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s secretary, once described Ghaffar Khan in the following manner: The greatest thing in him is, to my mind, his spirituality – or better still, the true spirit of Islam – submission to God. He

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has measured Gandhiji’s life all through this yardstick and his clinging to Gandhiji can be explained on no other ground. It is not Gandhiji’s name and fame that have attracted him to Gandhiji, nor his political work, nor his spirit of rebellion and revolution. It is his pure and ascetic life and his insistence on self-purification that have had the greatest appeal for him, and his whole life since 1919 onwards has been one sustained effort for self-purification.12 Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s followers, known as the Khudai Khidmatgars or Servants of God, pledged themselves to nonviolence as an ethics of conviction and as a political means to independence and freedom. Under the influence of Abdul Ghaffar Khan the movement found the basis for self-restraint, self-reliance and self-discipline, which enabled them to be fearless, patient and tolerant even in the face of oppressive violence. Hence the unique place of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in the history of nonviolence. He proved Gandhi’s claim that the imperative of Satyagraha integrates everyday politics within ethical values and anticipates a form of public life in which truthfulness and rightness are the grounds of anti-tyrannical experience. The true influence of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan can never be measured. Nevertheless, the unmistakable portrait of this great man in the great struggle against violence was drawn by Gandhi himself when he described Ghaffar Khan as a Pathan “who deliberately asked his Khudai Khidmatgars to shed all weapons when he asked them to join the satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act”.13 It is no accident that Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan believed firmly in Islam as a religion of truth, love and service to humanity. This is indeed fundamental to the whole mentality of nonviolence, with its active nonviolent resistance to evil and its concern, its deep faith that justice will eventually win. Martin Luther King’s world was built on these two principles. In him, we find a similar experience of the Gandhian Satyagraha. For Martin Luther King Jr nonviolent resistance was the most effective weapon against a racist and unjust social system in the United States. Though King Jr was deeply influenced by the black church heritage and evangelical liberal Christianity, his two principal tactics of non-cooperation and civil disobedience against racist laws in the United States were primarily influenced by Gandhi’s concept of Satyagraha. In King Jr’s thought, “Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.”14 King Jr went to great lengths to make it clear that nonviolence was not a method for the cowards or a method of achieving 102

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change through physical coercion, but a way of demonstrating one’s just cause by converting the opponent. According to King Jr, If you confront a man, who has long been cruelly misusing you, and say, “Punish me, if you will, I do not deserve it, but I will accept it so that the world will know I am right and you are wrong,” then you wield a powerful and a just weapon. This man, your oppressor, is automatically morally defeated, and if he has any conscience, he is ashamed. Wherever this weapon is used in a manner that stirs a community’s or a nation’s anguished conscience, then the pressure of public opinion becomes an ally in your just cause.15 It seems, therefore, that King Jr stands in the long tradition of spiritual understanding of nonviolence: he speaks of love (agape) as the central dynamic of nonviolent action, based on the Christian conviction that God is on the side of those who love their enemies and struggle for justice. Nonviolent action was related, in King’s mind, to a permanent struggle in human nature between good and evil. King Jr wrote: There is within human nature an amazing potential for goodness. There is within human nature something that can respond to goodness. I know somebody’s liable to say that this is an unrealistic movement if it goes on believing that all people are good. Well, I didn’t say that. I think . . . that there is a strange dichotomy of disturbing dualism within human nature. Many of the great philosophers and thinkers through the ages have seen this. . . . Plato, centuries ago said that the human personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions, so that within our individual lives we see this conflict and certainly when we come to the collective life of man, we see a strange badness.16 As such, Martin Luther King Jr considered Satyagraha as a process, never as an achievement. As King Jr became more deeply involved with the Gandhian Satyagraha against segregation in America, his understanding of nonviolence as a moral commitment to God and to other human beings was raised to an ultimate and absolute principle of social and political action. King Jr never concealed his debt to Gandhi for his method of Satyagraha as well as his refusal to separate the political from the ethical 103

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and the religious from the secular. To discover more about Gandhian philosophy, he traveled to India from 2 February to 10 March 1959. And so, Martin Luther King Jr not only read about Gandhian Satyagraha, he also tested the very ground that Gandhi had practiced his philosophy of Satyagraha. The genius of King’s action was to unify his Christian conception of love and Gandhi’s thought on Satyagraha. Actually, King Jr came to regard the Gandhian moment of nonviolence as an intrinsic continuation of the sayings of Jesus. For him, the practical consequence of the belief in Gandhian Satyagraha was an active application of the two concepts of love and community in terms of the concrete realities of black experience in America. In fact, King Jr came to believe that all the laws of the universe went in the direction of achieving the Beloved Community, which was reminiscent of Gandhi’s Ramarajya. Gandhi defined Ramarajya as a “moral government based upon truth and nonviolence.” He added: We call a State Ramarajya when both the ruler and his subjects are straightforward, when both are pure in heart, when both are inclined towards self-sacrifice, when both exercise restraint and self-control while enjoying worldly pleasures, and when the relationship between the two is as good as that between a father and a son. It is because we have forgotten this that we talk of democracy or the government of the people. . . . In my Ramarajya, however, public opinion cannot be measured by counting of heads or raising of hands.17 Though King Jr did not attempt to define his notion of a Beloved Community, he nevertheless constantly stressed his solidaristic approach to the idea of human community as an effort towards the realization of his conception of the Beloved Community. King Jr affirmed: “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”18 This idea of an inclusive human community tied to a vision of total connectedness was the description of King’s adaptation of the Gandhian Satyagraha to the context of elimination of racial injustice in the American society. In the same manner as for Martin Luther King Jr in America, the Gandhian experience of Satyagraha found its most authentic exemplification in the African continent with Nelson Mandela. “There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountain top of our desires.”19 These are the words of 104

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Nelson Mandela, who fought for nonviolence and democracy in South Africa. Mandela’s imprint and influence on our world and times as a nonviolent leader remain as powerful as that of Gandhi. Perhaps no leader in recent times has symbolized better the Gandhian moment as Mandela did – going beyond all distinctions of color, creed and class. His release from the Victor Verster prison in Paarl on 11 February 1990, after having served 27 years in prison and spending many of these years on Robben Island, was celebrated as the triumph of human dignity and nonviolence over injustice and repression in South Africa. With Mandela assuming office as president in 1994, South Africa started looking beyond its own violence and humiliations suffered for ages to heal the national and racial divide. Effective nonviolent actions played a crucial role in crippling the brutal and racist apartheid regime in South Africa, helping establish a legitimate, democratically elected black majority government. Despite ongoing arguments that an armed-violent struggle was catalytic and vital in befalling the charge South African apartheid society, one should not forget that the largely nonviolent strategies carried out by the black leaders like Mandela and Tutu and white sympathizers brought about internal resistance and international pressure forcing the apartheid government to negotiate a peaceful transfer to the people of South Africa. In addition to traditional nonviolent tactics such as protests and boycotts, the antiapartheid movement also developed alternative institutions, effectively creating a “situation of dual power in South Africa, where institutions affecting the daily lives of blacks . . . came to be managed by black South Africans themselves”.20 These civic type institutions became the de facto government and in the process delegitimized traditional governments. The fact that many of the nonviolent movements were effectively educated, empowered and mobilized stresses that the resistance consisted of both principle and tactic. The nonviolent activists in South Africa were gradually trained to anticipate losses to achieve a wider goal of determination – a determination as strong as violent resistance, to risk one’s life in pursuit of justice and nonviolence. However, due to constant violent uprisings and guerilla warfare carried out by armed factions, this internalizing process of nonviolence continued to be disrupted. In the years preceding Mandela’s arrest and long internment, “the communists’ enthusiasm for armed struggle had a marked influence on Mandela’s own outlook, making it seem more feasible than would have been the case.”21 What further convinced Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) leaders of using the guerilla warfare against the apartheid regime in 105

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South Africa were the anticolonial examples of Cuba and Algeria. “To make up for his own lack of knowledge, Mandela read everything he could lay his hands on about guerilla warfare and war history: authors like Guevara, Mao Tse-tung, Castro and Clausewitz; books on Algeria, Cuba, Israel, Kenya and the Anglo-Boer War.”22 It was decided that Mandela would form Umkhonto we Sizwe (The Spear of the Nation) and engage in careful sabotage operations against apartheid institutions. Predictably, the armed struggle led to greater support for the apartheid regime and its repression of terrorism. It became clear that violence, even that which specifically targeted governmental institutions, was not effective. A decade later, in the mid-1970s, Mandela admitted his mistake in establishing Umkhonto and abandoning the work of political organization. He wrote: We, who formed Umkhonto, were all members of the African National Congress and had behind us the ANC tradition of nonviolence and negotiation as a means of solving political disputes. We believed that South Africa belonged to all people who lived in it, and not to one group, be it black or white. We did not want an interracial war and tried to avoid it to the last minute.23 As such, Mandela and the ANC recognized that, rather than armed struggle, it was non-cooperation of the people that was more critical. A major revitalization of the nonviolent resistance movement again spurred up in the 1970s, through the Black Consciousness movement, which was inspired by Steve Biko. The aim of the group and the late leader Steve Biko was to “rebuild and recondition the mind of the oppressed . . . [and] to demand back what was rightfully theirs.”24 The tactical advantages of nonviolent resistance gained wide support through the Black Consciousness movement, while inspiring different social groups to join in the nonviolent struggle for freedom. These groups consisted of churches, civil associations, trade unions and student organizations. From the early 1970s until the end of the apartheid rule, these organizations carried out various types of nonviolent tactics to bring about change. To try to halt the challenges of the nonviolent movement, the South African government was forced to impose a strict state of emergency in 1985, which was meant to deal with curbing the unarmed resistance. The emergency call by the government only intensified the nonviolent resistance and galvanized the international system in imposing economic sanctions. This, combined 106

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with a new defiance campaign in 1989 with millions marching across the country from Durban to Johannesburg and the increasing costs of internal security from the nonviolent struggle, led South Africa into an economic crisis which forced many of the country’s elites to advocate a peaceful transfer of power. Mandela’s step to freedom on 11 February 1990, and him becoming the country’s first black President on 10 May 1994, with the National Party’s de Klerk as his first deputy and Thabo Mbeki as the second in the Government of National Unity, brought the new South Africa into being. In his inaugural address as president, Mandela emphasized the need for South Africa to build a new society based on nonviolence and peace: The time for the healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us. We have, at last, achieved our political emancipation. We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discriminations. . . . We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity – a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.25 Mandela’s intention in practicing nonviolence was to establish national reconciliation in South Africa. But to succeed in this, he knew well that South Africa had to listen to its violent past and to heal it. As an institution of forgiveness, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission acted on behalf of the South African State in order to try to heal the wounds of many who suffered from violence. “We may never forget, but we must forgive,”26 underlined Mandela. And he added: “To make peace with an enemy, one must work with that enemy, and that enemy becomes your partner.”27 This is the clue to Mandela’s Gandhian moment, which puzzled some in the black and in the white communities within South Africa and elsewhere who took a long time to put their hearts into believing the nonviolent process of nation-building. One thing is certain: by not letting up on nonviolence in politics, Mandela, together with the South African people, became one of the key models for nonviolent action in the twenty-first century. Mandela strengthened the institutional bases of the Gandhian Satyagraha by engaging his moral capital in the direction of civic participation and democratic deliberation in South Africa. 107

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The Gandhian Satyagraha remains today a universal matrix for all the political thinking of our age. As a great insight and a valuable instrument of emancipation, Gandhi’s Satyagraha continues to represent the basis of all nonviolent struggles against injustice. Gandhi’s logic was his Satyagraha. He lived this logic by cutting his wants to the minimum, and engaging in self-suffering and service to mankind. Yet, more than anything, Gandhi highlighted the need for struggle against all forms of injustice. If this is so, those who hurt others put into question their own human dignity and integrity. Satyagraha, therefore, is an art of living together. For this very reason, as heirs of this art, we need to take care to educate humanity towards the consciousness of what is due to her by virtue of a superior example of human achievement. Gandhi did not expect all human beings to become Satyagrahis: “the [practice] of Satyagraha by the vast mass of mankind will be impossible if they had all to assimilate all of its implications.”28 However, he did not despair, since he knew well that “civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to human beings the path of duty.”29

Acknowledgment Parts of this article were previously published in Antyajaa: Indian Journal of Women and Social Change, February 2017.30

Notes 1 Sanghvi, Vijay, The Congress: Indira to Sonia Gandhi, Delhi: Kalpaz Publication, 2006, p. 29. 2 Mazmudar, Bharati, Gandhiji’s Non-violence in Theory and Practice, Mumbai: Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya, 2003, p. 9, www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/Gandhiji’s-Nonviolence-In-Theory-and-Practice.pdf accessed on 22 September 2016. 3 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments With Truth, translated from the Gujarati by Mahadev Desai, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, pp. 294–295. 4 Haley, Alex, Playboy Interview With Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, 1965, www. thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/19/alex-haley-s-1965-playboy-interviewwith-rev-martin-luther-king-jr.html accessed on 22 September 2016. 5 Rao, K.L. Sheshagiri, Mahatma Gandhi and Comparative Religion, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1978, p. 64. 6 Tilley, Terrence W., The Wisdom of Religious Commitment, Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1995, p. 147. 7 Gandhi, Mohandas, Gandhi: Selected Writings, edited with an introduction by Ronald Duncan, Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2005, p. 47.

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8 Veeravalli, Anuradha, Gandhi in Political Theory: Truth, Law and Experiment, New York: Routledge, 2014, p. 14. 9 Pandikattu, Kuruvilla, 2001, Gandhi: The Meaning of Mahatma for the Millennium, Indian Philosophical Studies, V, USA: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, p. 64. 10 Dhiman, O.P., Betrayal of Gandhi, New Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2010, pp. 85–86. 11 Rao, K.L. Sheshagiri, Mahatma Gandhi and Comparative Religion, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1978, p. 99. 12 Easwaran, Eknath, A Man to Match His Mountains: Badshah Khan, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam, Nilgiri Press, 1984, p. 143. 13 Gandhi, Rajmohan, Ghaffar Khan: Nonviolent Badshah of the Pakhtuns, Delhi: Penguin Books, 2004, p. 131. 14 Carson, Clayborne, The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr, Volume IV: Symbol of the Movement (January 1957 – December 1958), Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, p. 72. 15 Haley, Alex, Playboy Interview With Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, op. cit. 16 Drawn from a transcript of a speech that Martin Luther King Jr delivered in 1961 to the annual meeting of the Fellowship of the Concerned in Atlanta, www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd= 1 & c a d = r j a & u a c t = 8 & v e d = 0 a h U K E w j I 3 r q 4 p q X PA h U B w W M KHRGOCjYQFggbMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kellimcbride. com%2Fdocs%2Fking.doc&usg=AFQjCNH18I7pgUClyBMpnkbpBfm gKeml_w&sig2=qYcTC09B1J7dEjgt0o2yDw&bvm=bv.133700528,d. dGo accessed on 23 September 2016. 17 Mukherjee, Rudrangshu, The Penguin Gandhi Reader, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1993, p. xv. 18 Hill, Johnny Bernard, The Theology of Martin Luther King Jr and Desmon Mpilu Tutu, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 125. 19 Cohen, David Elliot and Battersby, John D., Nelson Mandela: A Life in Photographs, New York: Sterling, 2009, p. 23. 20 Dudouet, Veronique, Civil Resistance and Conflict Transformation: Transitions From Armed to Nonviolent Struggle, New York: Routledge, 2015, p. 116. 21 Meredith, Martin, Mandela: A Biography, USA: Penguin, 2010 (1997), p. 199. 22 Ibid., p. 201. 23 Ibid., p. 262. 24 Zunes, Stephen, “The Role of Non-Violent Action in the Downfall of Apartheid”, The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1 (March, 1999), p. 152, file:///C:/Users/AAW/Downloads/Zunes,%20Non-Violent% 20Struggle.pdf 25 Clark, Nancy L. and Worger, William H., South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, New York: Routledge, 2016, p. 196. 26 Dodamgoda, Dinesh D., “Would Mandela Be Killed in Sri Lanka?”, Colombo Telegraph, 14 September 2015, www.colombotelegraph.com/ index.php/would-mandela-be-killed-in-sri-lanka/ accessed on 23 September 2016.

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27 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J., The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life, Berghahn Books, 2016, p. 106. 28 Pföstl, Eva, Between Ethics and Politics: Gandhi Today, New Delhi: Routledge, 2014, p. 67. 29 Bilgrami, Akeel, Democratic Culture: Historical and Philosophical Essays, New Delhi: Routledge, 2011, p. 7. 30 Jahanbegloo, Ramin. Volume 1, Issue 2, December 2016. http://journals. sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2455632716674647 accessed on 01 February, 2018.

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