Niranjan Ramakrishnan 
The following is an edited excerpt from Reading Gandhi in the Twenty-First Century, by Niranjan Ramakrishnan (Palgrave Pivot, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
“In theory,” says the wag, “things should be the same in theory and practice. In practice, though, they aren’t.”
This might serve to explain why every modern state has only grown powerful over time, instead of becoming irrelevant as theory ordains. [Even] when it has gone from one ideology to its diametrical opposite, the state itself has never looked discomfited in the slightest degree.
With consistent abuse, the state, always a little suspect for its motives, is firmly established in the public mind as just another arm of a particular dispensation, not an impartial and benign entity sitting above the fray. The Hindi adage jiski lathi uski bhains (he who holds the stick gets the buffalo), conveys exactly this truth. Conversely, the wielders of state power, too, in such a context, come to view it as a routine accessory to their plans and purposes. That such corruption can seize alike a capitalist, communist, or any other type of state is hardly in question.
Gandhi instinctively grasped the underlying purpose of the state, and therefore its nature; squabbles over its intent to reconcile or suppress class divisions were just a sideshow to a more serious aspect. The state was the antithesis of the individual, and of ahimsa:
The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence….I look upon an increase of the power of the state with the greatest fear, because all the while apparently doing good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of all progress.” [Gandhi’s “Interview with N.K Bose, 1934; reproduced in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG), VOL, 65, p 318,]
Nearly three decades after these words, Gandhi’s general sense of unease with rampant state power was given more specific voice in an unlikely quarter, by no less than the leader of the industrialised world. Eisenhower’s words of caution could have come right out of one of Gandhi’s journals; instead, they were the reflections of a general-statesman as he prepared to retire after two terms as president of the United States:
[The] conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the federal government.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
[Eisenhower’s farewell address, 1961.]
Eisenhower’s warnings went unheeded in his own country. In the rest of the world, meanwhile, the military-industrial mindset has taken firm roots, not least in Gandhi’s own native land… In the five decades since Eisenhower gave his farewell address, spending on weapons worldwide has risen multi-fold. The military-industrial complex thrives.
Also read: Where Is Gandhi in the India of Today?
This would not surprise Gandhi. The modern industrial state to him always appeared a tad specious. While his contemporaries were bowled over by its apparent benevolence and capacity for endless fulfillment of wants, he saw even in its best face a progressive entrapment of humanity with promises of comfort and consequence-(and conscience-)free enjoyment. He saw, too, that modern industry could not be sustained without centralization of power and a commensurate strengthening of the state. Far from being cause for celebration, the rise of a technocracy to mediate between people and the (industrial) plant often meant citizens ceding sovereignty for creature comforts. To him this was not a step towards human liberation, the instinctive measure by which he reckoned good or bad:
I suggest that, if India is to evolve along nonviolent lines, it will have to decentralize many things. Centralisation cannot be sustained and defended without adequate force…[Harijan, December 30, 1939, CWMG, Vol 77, p 165]
The endless quest for resources on one side and markets on the other that industrialisation demanded, coupled with the military logic required to secure the one or ensure the other, was to Gandhi the road to moral, if not material, bankruptcy:
The incessant search for material comforts and their multiplication is such an evil, and I make bold to say that the Europeans themselves will have to remodel their outlook, if they are not to perish under the weight of the comforts to which they are becoming slaves. It may be that my reading is wrong, but I know that for India to run after the Golden Fleece is to court certain death. [Young India, April 30, 1931; CWMG, Vol. 52, p. 9]
The wages of pursuing the ‘Golden Fleece’ were seldom better captured than in a piece by the soldier-scholae Andrew Bacevich pondering the shoals upon which a 63-year spree of consumerism had marooned his country:
American preoccupation with “more” has affected US relations with the rest of the world. Yet the foreign policy implications of our self-indulgence are almost entirely negative. Over the past six decades, efforts to satisfy spiralling consumer demand have given birth to a condition of profound dependency. The ethic of self-gratification saddles us with costly commitments abroad that we are increasingly ill-equipped to sustain while confronting us with dangers to which we have no ready response. [Andrew Basevich, ‘Appetite for Destruction,’ The American Conservative, September 8, 2008.]
In other writings, Basevich has pointed to the military-industrial state, despairing of the evident American democracy to rein in this Frankenstein’s monster in either of its incarnations: warmonger abroad or super-secret national security behemoth at home. But Gandhi had anticipated both Eisenhower and Basevich, getting right to the heart of the matter:
Science of war leads one to dictatorship pure and simple. Science of non-violence can alone lead one to pure democracy. [Harijan, October 15, 1938, CWMG, Vol 74, p. 89 ]
[…]
In the speech referred to earlier, Eisenhower hoped that the American public would keep an eye on the burgeoning military-industrial complex so as to keep it from overrunning their very liberties:
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes…. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. [Eisenhower’s farewell address, 1961.]
Also read: Is Gandhi Passé?
On the fiftieth anniversary of Eisenhower’s address, many commentators pointed to his prescience and the unfolding of the very prospect he had feared, some even taking note of the remarkable lassitude with which Americans have tolerated it all. They would not have known that Gandhi had gone a step further: keeping the state in line would require not just an “alert and knowledgeable” citizenry but one actually prepared to offer civil disobedience, always keeping it in reserve as a permanent weapon of good:
Civil disobedience, therefore, becomes a sacred duty when the State has become lawless, or which is the same thing, corrupt. And a citizen that barters with such a State shares its corruption or lawlessness. It is, therefore, possible to question the wisdom of applying civil disobedience in respect of a particular act or law….But the right itself cannot be surrendered without surrender of one’s self-respect. [Young India, January 5, 1922; CWMG]
[…] As Gandhi said, civil disobedience is the only – and ultimate – safeguard against a state gone rogue: “it is a birthright that cannot be surrendered without surrender of one’s self-respect.” [‘The Immediate Issue’, Young India, January 5, 1922, CWMG, Vol 25, p. 392]
Ay, there’s the rub, as the old line goes. For only citizens can have self-respect; consumers merely understand value-for-money. In a silent (no pun intended) metamorphosis, the citizenry of Eisenhower’s time has, over the decades, become the consumer society of our own. It is also a glimpse into exactly what Gandhi feared a mindless march to industrialism would bring about in India.
Niranjan Ramakrishnan was a long-time contributor to Counterpunch and Countercurrents and his work has been carried by Z-Mag, Common Dreams and Dissident Voice. Among the print outlets that have featured his writings are The Oregonian, the Indian Express, The Hindu, India Today and the Economic Times. His first book, Bantaism – The Philosophy of Sardar Jokes (2011), was hailed for its audacity by noted author and historian Khushwant Singh.
This piece was originally published on October 2, 2023.