Understanding Gandhi’s Vision of Swaraj

It is difficult to critically engage with Gandhi. We love Gandhi, because there has not been such a man in India since the Buddha, so enlightened and so inspirational. He taught us tolerance and how to live together with people who are not like us. Thousands of Indians were moved by his humanity, political inventiveness, creativity and sense of humour.

Jawaharlal Nehru summed up Gandhi’s genius when he wrote: “These parlour socialists are especially hard on Gandhiji as the arch reactionary. But the little fact remains that that this ‘reactionary’ knows India, understands India, almost is peasant India, and has shaken up India as no so-called revolutionary has done…Reactionary or revolutionary, he has changed the face of India, given pride and character to a cringing and demoralised people, built up strength and consciousness in the masses, and made the India problem a world problem.”

It is also difficult to critically engage with Ramin Jahanbegloo, an accomplished political philosopher who knows Gandhi so intimately, who has imbibed Gandhian philosophy so completely, and who writes on Gandhi so passionately. Yet I dare engage with him for reasons that might become clear in the review that follows.

Ramin skillfully weaves in the concept of Swaraj into a family of concepts – ahimsa, satyagraha and tolerance. In the introduction, he suggests that the history of our world would have been very different if Gandhi had not existed. No one would disagree with this opening statement. The history of the Congress party and that of the mainstream freedom struggle would certainly have been different if Gandhi had not appeared onto the scene of Indian politics as a veritable magician, and conceived of groundbreaking strategies that befuddled the colonial power.

Ramin goes further and suggests that never before in history was an individual recognised as the embodiment of truth and righteousness. I assume that he would make exceptions for Socrates, Christ, and Buddha. But this a minor point.

In modern history, Gandhi was an exemplar with his own life mirroring his politics. The facility with which he converted individual concepts and strategies into political action was amazing. Jahanbegloo cites the example of ahimsa which was till Gandhi’s time a religious concept. I would add that Gandhi transformed the individual resistance of an Antigone into civil disobedience, and the peroration of Socrates in Plato’s Apology (which he translated into Gujarati) as the moral foundation of his theory of, what Ramin calls, epistemic humility.

The foundations of Gandhian concept of Swaraj is his belief that every individual has the capacity for and the right to self-government, suggests Ramin. Swaraj leads to mental liberation and encourages Indians to find self-expression for the benefit and service of humanity. Swaraj was not only the end of British rule but a substantial break with the dark side of modernity. Political “self-rule went hand in hand with individual self-realisation and self-regulation”.  The self-realisation of individuals was not only a right but a duty (p 30).

Here I must differ, somewhat, from the author. Gandhi inherited a tradition of the spiritualisation of politics from Vivekananda and Aurobindo. In his hands, Swaraj became a mobilisational technique, an objective of struggle, and the vision of a desired society after independence. The primary concern of Aurobindo and Gandhi was the balance of individual freedom with the social order. An individual cannot be free if her society is subjected to colonialism. She also cannot be free if her psyche is dominated by ignoble passions – greed, corruption, lust, absence of compassion, or cruelty.

What is the point of acquiring freedom if all that newly minted citizens want to do is to swig Feni or consume drugs on the beaches of Goa as the flower children of the late 1960s and 1970s did? A free society demands the right sort of citizens. Witness the paradox. Colonialism disciplined society. A free society also has to discipline citizens, because indiscipline can wreck a carefully cultivated social order and neutralise civic virtue. This was the conundrum of Swaraj as a collective right and Swaraj as an individual duty.

Ramin writes that Gandhi’s vision of Indian self-rule was a spiritual civilisation which rested on multi-cultural and multi-religious values, and where communal harmony and dialogical cooperation prevailed (p 31). Admittedly, Gandhi’s approach to Indian society was inclusive and egalitarian. But his vocabulary, note, was that of Brahmanical Hinduism. His mobilisation techniques, his reflections on the nature of politics, and his insistence that Indians can achieve Swaraj only through self-discipline all evoke religious imagery, whether it be Swaraj or Ram Rajya.

Indeed, he could conceive of no other form of politics.

Certainly, this contributed a great deal to his popularity among the people and his success in mobilising them. “Like a poet”, writes Dennis Dalton, “he used his past with affection, drawing from the Indian classics old words – ahimsa, Karma Yoga, Ram Raj, Sarvodaya – and charging them with fresh meaning, until they became symbols of both the past and the future.”

Consider whether the use of Hindu concepts like moksha was not counter-productive in a multi-religious public sphere created by the freedom struggle. Politically, Gandhi struggled to bring Hindus and Muslims together by forging a mass coalition of religious groups, urban and rural elites, and caste groups. He believed that religion had the power to transform individuals from self-regarding to other-regarding beings. Sadly, he did not succeed.

The historian Judith Brown writes that besides appreciating Gandhi’s contributions to the politics of nationalism, we need to note the opposition to him. Many Muslims for their part were increasingly fearful of a politics couched in the language of a Hindu Mahatma and believed that once the British had gone, they would be at the mercy of a Hindu majority and a well-organised Congress, largely Hindu in its composition.

These are some of the complexities in Gandhi’s Swaraj. Undeniably, Gandhi contributed immensely, as Ramin meticulously argues, to placing ethics at the centre of politics. He was competing unfortunately with segmented identities introduced by the colonial state. So his commitment to bringing about Hindu-Muslim unity as a precondition for Swaraj did not work when it came to demands for a state of one’s own.

History shows us that religious vocabularies do not make for sound politics. Politicised religion can prove deadly because it escalates into the hardening of identities, separatism, and ultimately the demand for a state of one’s own. Idealism fades before the lust for power.

Gandhi’s reasons for deploying a religious idiom are beautifully captured by Ramin. But in politics good intentions can lead to unanticipated consequences. Gandhi probably did not take into account political pragmatism articulated by the idealist Jean Jacques Rousseau: we must take men as they are and laws as they should be. Gandhi did not take men as they are, he wanted to change them. Therefore, the display of competitiveness and acquisitiveness shook him as independence came near.

On June 5, 1947, he wrote: ‘It is very difficult – practically impossible – to achieve real swaraj without self-denial…But today we are engaged in a race for positions of power. Shall I describe it as my own tragedy, the tragedy of our soldiers of truth and ahimsa?”

Competitive nationalism resulted in the Partition. And in despair Gandhi wrote on July 25, 1947: ‘Why so jubilant? Purna Swaraj is far off. Have we got Swaraj? Did Swaraj mean only that the British rule should end? To my mind it was not so. For me Sabarmati is far off, Noakhali is near.”

The tragedies that rocked India in 1947 dented Gandhi’s belief in the goodness of men and their ability to realise authentic freedom or Swaraj. It is testimony to his courage and his perseverance that he continued to try and restore peace in a troubled land, appeal to men to conquer their passion for bloodlust, and plead for the restoration of humanity. He was fated to disappointment, fated to be killed in cold blood by an assassin who stood for everything Gandhi abhorred, the cynical use of religion and the readiness to murder for the cause of a deplorable ideology. Ramin is to be congratulated for this excellent work. Unfortunately, idealism flies out of the window when power politics takes over.