Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (85 page)

One looks in vain for a clear exposition of Gandhi’s social philosophy in his writings. He was prepared to change his theory according to his experience and aptly called his autobiography
My Experiments with Truth.
In his voluminous writings, he left behind no clear system of moral or political philosophy but rather ‘an existential pattern of thought and deed’.
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Since he was mainly concerned with persuading people, his writings chiefly consist of the monotonous repetition of a few basic themes.

The primary motive of Gandhi’s pacifism was religious but in South Africa he developed a specific method of resistance (against the registration laws for Indians) which he called
Satyagraha.
The term in Gujarati means ‘firmness in the truth’ but in Gandhi’s hands it became a kind of non-violent struggle. Tolstoy had urged that the way to undermine the State is to refuse to co-operate with it but Gandhi shifted the emphasis from passive to active non-violent resistance. He regarded ‘passive resistance’ as the weapon of the weak, but he was also wary of the kind of ‘civil disobedience’ which implies angry defiance. His strategy was therefore a form of non-violent resistance which sought to fight with the power of truth rather than with the force of the body. Based on the precept ‘Hate the sin but not the sinner’, it aimed at defeating the enemy without harming him or arousing hatred. In practice, it involved the classical syndicalist tactic of the strike, but it also entailed refusing to hit back at charging police and lying on railway lines.

For all his commitment to non-violence, Gandhi was not in fact an absolute pacifist. He became a stretcher bearer on the British side in the Boer War, even acting as a kind of recruiting sergeant for the British Army. He was prepared to be a stretcher bearer in the First World War. He always thought it better to fight than to be a coward: ‘where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence’, he declared.
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One of Gandhi’s most important contributions to libertarian theory was his clarification of the relationship between means and ends. He insisted that the two cannot be separated; means are ends. Means are never merely instrumental, but create their own ends; they are ends-in-the-making.
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If we concentrate on the right means then the desirable ends will follow automatically. Again, by acting here and now as if we are free agents capable of self-rule, we actually bring about the free society rather than seeing it as some distant goal. His non-violent revolution therefore does not involve the seizure of power but the transformation of everyday life and relationships.

Although his method was gradualist and piecemeal, Gandhi was a revolutionary who sought not only to end British rule in India but to transform traditional Indian society and eventually world society. His long-term goal was to realize a realm of peace and justice throughout the world, to bring
about
Ram Raj
, the kingdom of God on earth. To this end, he deepened his campaign in the 1930s to uproot the worse aspects of the caste system by concentrating on the lot of the untouchables. He deliberately called them
Harijans
(Children of God) and set an example by doing their traditional work like cleaning out his own toilet. The campaign showed his profound wish to bring about a more equal and co-operative society. He was concerned to provide service to ‘backward tribes’ as well as to bring about the ‘uplift of women’. Women he felt were equal in status, but different in function. He demanded the abolition of
purdah
and hoped that women would be able to practise sexual restraint once freed from male domination.

Gandhi’s ‘Constructive Programme’, as it came to be known, not only included the end of untouchability and communal reconciliation, but also the renewal of village life. He told his co-workers in 1944:

In Gandhi’s view, it was essential to create a new society on the sound base of a decentralized economy, in which villages grew their own food and developed industries based on local materials. Suspicious of the nomadic hunter as much as the city slicker, he felt that the ideal society would combine good husbandry with a high level of craftsmanship. Artisans should be their own masters and the land should belong to those who cultivate it Children ought to practise handicrafts before reading and writing in order to learn how to use their hands; like everyone else, they should do ‘bread-labour’ in field or workshop to help meet their basic needs. All should enjoy the benefits of a simple and self-reliant life.

Despite his emphasis on crafts, Gandhi was no Luddite opposed to technological progress. He was not against electricity although he thought each village should have its own power station to maintain its autonomy. The few remaining centralized factories would be run by workers with their former owners acting as trustees.

Gandhi’s libertarian sensibility not only comes through in his description of his ideal society but also in his criticism of the State and parliamentary democracy. Like Tolstoy, he fully realized that the State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. He feared the power of the State, even when it tries to minimize exploitation and provide welfare, since it destroys individuality which lies at the root of all progress. Instead, he advocated
swaraj
or self-government, by which he meant the ‘continuous effort to be free of government control, whether it is foreign or whether it is national’.
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It would be the first step towards his ultimate ideal, a form of
enlightened anarchy in which social life is self-regulated and ‘there is no political power because there is no state’.
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While Gandhi does not reject the notion of a State in a transitional period, it is clear in his writings that he does not mean anything more by it than a co-ordinating body in a decentralized society of autonomous villages. Although a person’s concern would be first directed towards his neighbours, it would not end there:

In place of parliamentary democracy, he proposed a form of indirect democracy in which each village would be ruled by its own traditional five-man council and would elect a representative to the district council. Each district would elect a representative to the regional council which in turn would choose members of the national council. The latter would have little to do other than co-ordinate communications, energy, minerals and other resources. There would be no need for an army: if the land were invaded, peace brigades would meet the invader and oppose them non-violently. The police might still have to use restraint on wrongdoers but they would not be punished and prisons would be turned into education centres. Disputes would be solved by arbitration amongst neighbours rather than by lawcourts.

It is easy to overestimate Gandhi’s anarchist tendencies. Although he declared that ‘The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy’, he did not call for the immediate abolition of State and government.
¹⁰
Although he resigned from the Indian National Congress and had a diminishing influence on its policies, he initiated the 1942 Quit India movement. After independence, he made no frontal criticism of the Indian government.

While Gandhi wanted to end political coercion, many of his opponents felt morally coerced by him. It is almost as if he felt it necessary to internalize the laws of the State in the individual so that he or she would be capable of self-restraint. He constantly stressed the need for duty, and called for the willing submission of the individual to the well-being of society.

There was also a strong puritanical and repressive streak in his personality and teaching which led him to prohibit tobacco and alcohol. He recommended strict sexual continence, and for those incapable of it, he would only countenance sex for procreation and not pleasure. His society might be tolerant of different religions, but it would expect a rigid moral
code. He ruled like a patriarch in his communes or
ashrams
in South Africa and India and did not always reject the role of the venerable
guru.
Like Godwin he believed that close friendship and loyalty can override the demands of impartial justice but his own imperfect practice of universal benevolence led to claims that he was inconsiderate to his own wife and children.

Gandhi also deliberately cultivated a power of his own which did not always have democratic tendencies. ‘Non-violence’, he declared, ‘does not seize power. It does not even seek power. Power accrues to it.’
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After the First World Gandhi helped organize, mainly through the Indian National Congress, collective acts of non-violent resistance, including the Salt March. After 1932 however he increasingly acted as a charismatic leader exerting moral and spiritual power over his opponents. As an outstanding
satyagrahi
, he grew more isolated, and by exercising so much power himself he prevented others from developing their own initiative. Indeed, for all his undoubted sincerity and humility, his form of persuasion could at times become a kind of moral coercion.
Satyagraha
, or the force of truth, could in practice degenerate into
duragraha
, the force of stubbornness.
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Gandhi’s chosen tactic was to oppose moral power against political power, but in the end the anarchist goal is to decentralize and dissolve power altogether. Just as Gandhi the patriarch prevented his
ashrams
from becoming wayward self-governing communities, so the example of India’s most famous
satyagrahi
hindered the development of a mass libertarian movement of equals.

Nevertheless, Gandhi remained until the end deeply suspicious of political power. When asked what would happen to India if the British abdicated their responsibility, he replied: ‘Leave India to God. If that is too much to believe, then leave her to anarchy.’ After Indian independence, he suggested that his fellow constructive workers should not enter politics; their task was to mould the politics of the country without taking power for themselves. Just before he died, he also urged the leaders of Congress, his party, to avoid the ‘ungainly skirmish for power’ and to turn their organization into a ‘body of servants of the nation engaged in constructive work, mostly in the villages, to achieve social, moral and economic freedom’.
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Needless to say, his advice fell on deaf ears, and his ‘political heir’ Pandit Nehru proceeded to militarize and centralize the Indian State amidst mounting communal violence between Hindus and Muslims.

Through his spectacular feats of fasting, Gandhi tried to bring political and religious factions together. Despite his enormous prestige, he failed to unite the warring factions. Winston Churchill’s ‘half-naked fakir’ had helped bring an empire to its knees but he was unable to hold back the violent passions checked by colonial rule. After being shot by a fellow Hindu in January 1948, the funeral of the penniless anarchist and pacifist became
a huge State affair, organized by the military authorities, with a British general in charge. It was the final irony of a complex life.

Gandhi once defined himself as a politician trying to be a saint. He was certainly a practical politician, ready to make compromises and forge temporary alliances in his overriding drive to make India independent of colonial rule. Even so, as George Orwell observed, he managed to shake empires by sheer spiritual power and ‘compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!’.
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Gandhi accepted the title of Mahatma, the teacher, but he once declared: ‘There is no such thing as ‘Gandhism’ and I do not want to leave any sect after me.’
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It was enough for him that he was his own follower. But while there are not many ‘Gandhians’, even in India, his experiments with truth and his technique of non-violence have had a wide influence. He demonstrated that non-violence is not only an effective means of resistance but that it can be used to transform society peacefully. He also showed that the individual, and a group of individuals, can by their example wield enormous moral power which can shake political authority to its roots.

In the West, Gandhi has primarily been seen as a national leader whose principal aim was to achieve independence for India.
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But he was also influential in bringing pacifism and anarchism together. It has been argued that, after 1930, Gandhi came to accept the modern State, but apart from some ambiguous statements there is little evidence to support this view.
¹⁷
On the contrary, Gandhi remained an anarchist to the end, albeit of a distinctly Indian stamp, since he believed that the State is incompatible with the moral and spiritual nature of humanity. His ideal was always ‘enlightened anarchy’ even though he recognized that the State was likely to continue to exist for a long time. Above all, he insisted that any State is not simply a structure built to legitimize organized violence, but that it consists of a network of internal relations with its own citizens. It would never be adequate merely to ‘overthrow’ it; it will only disappear with the liberation of our own selves. This is Gandhi’s central and most enduring insight.