The Gandhian Moment

Ramin Jahanbegloo

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674074873
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Gandhi is revered as a historic leader, the father of Indian independence, and the inspiration for nonviolent protest around the world. But the importance of these practical achievements has obscured Gandhi's stature as an extraordinarily innovative political thinker. Ramin Jahanbegloo presents Gandhi the political theorist—the intellectual founder of a system predicated on the power of nonviolence to challenge state sovereignty and domination. A philosopher and an activist in his own right, Jahanbegloo guides us through Gandhi's core ideas, shows how they shaped political protest from 1960s America to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond, and calls for their use today by Muslims demanding change.Gandhi challenged mainstream political ideas most forcefully on sovereignty. He argued that state power is not legitimate simply when it commands general support or because it protects us from anarchy. Instead, legitimacy depends on the consent of dutiful citizens willing to challenge the state nonviolently when it acts immorally. The culmination of the inner struggle to recognize one's duty to act, Jahanbegloo says, is the ultimate "Gandhian moment."Gandhi's ideas have motivated such famous figures as Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama. As Jahanbegloo demonstrates, they also inspired the unheralded Muslim activists Abul Kalam Azad and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, whose work for Indian independence answers those today who doubt the viability of nonviolent Islamic protest. The book is a powerful reminder of Gandhi's enduring political relevance and a pioneering account of his extraordinary intellectual achievements.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

GANDHI’S INVERSION OF MODERN POLITICAL PERCEPTION

His physical body has left us and we shall never see him again or hear his gentle voice or run to him for counsel. But his imperishable memory and immortal message remain with us.

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU

Everyone knows the central ontological question: “Why is there being rather than nothing?” There is another, more obscure philosophical question, however, that the human race has similarly been unable to answer: “Why is there violence rather than nonviolence?” Why is there so much violence in the world today? Terrorism, religious and ethnic rivalries, environmental deterioration, economic crises, and unending international hostilities—all of which point to a world of global challenges and multiple threats. It is clear that in a world plagued by violence, we urgently need strong ethical thinking that insists on living up to fundamental principles in interactions among individuals and among nations and on changing the political realities that foster war. At a time when we are confronted by clashes of national interest, religious fundamentalism, and ethnic and racial prejudices, the principle of nonviolence may be our best bet in laying the groundwork of a new cosmopolitics. Though many continue to believe that nonviolence is ineffective against dictatorships and genocide, in the past several decades many democratic initiatives premised on what might be called “militant nonviolence,” an affirmation of citizens’ agency and a kind of neo-Gandhian quest for peace and justice, have achieved important successes. Perhaps never in the history of the human race has nonviolence been so crucial. Nonviolence has recently evolved from a simple tactic of resistance to a cosmopolitical aim based on international application of the principles of democracy. Given the global nature of the threats we face, the promotion of nonviolent solutions must be international. Achieving a global politics of nonviolence is the task not only of governments but also of civil society and intergovernmental, nongovernmental, and transnational organizations. Only a nonviolent society can work its way up to creating fully mature political institutions and realize lasting intercultural and interreligious harmony. At a time when terror conditions the life and mentality of at least two-thirds of humanity and violence influences our everyday culture, we cannot continue with the policy of the ostrich, having given up inquiring “whose responsibility is it?”

It would be a folly to expect nonviolence to become effective and durable, while the majority still thinks of politics in terms of the use of violence. It is true, as Hannah Arendt affirms: “Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance.”¹ But it is also true that there is no long-term success in political freedom in the absence of morality. Thus, the political is dependent on the suprapolitical, which remains independent from politics. If politics does not remain dependent on the suprapolitical, it may end up in ruin.

That is to say, political events bring moral responsibilities, and in turn ethical views place their imprint on political decisions. Politics without ethics is pure exercise of power. It is only in combination with ethics that politics can be elevated as a public virtue. It is true that politicians eager to teach and impose moral behavior have committed terrible crimes. But spiritualizing politics, as Gandhi understood, is not about moralizing them, but is an effort to redefine them in terms of civic responsibility in an explicit public sphere. In his view, to engage in politics is to act in a civic role in a morally conscientious and socially responsible manner. Nonviolence is the key to this. The time has come for us to renew our commitment, politically, economically, and culturally to the Gandhian moment of politics.

In general, what I mean here by “the Gandhian moment” is the transformative power of nonviolent resistance in the hearts and minds of all those struggling for the opening of a democratic political space. Great public and political events, of course, might also be termed Gandhian moments. Think of the nonviolent changes inspired by mass demonstrations of people opposed to using military force in the United States, Eastern Europe, Latin America, South Africa, and the Philippines in the second half of the twentieth century. More recently, with the “Arab Spring” and the Green Movement in Iran, the world witnessed once again the mobilization of people, even with a mixed record of political success, seizing moral authority and relying not on violence but on courage and the truthfulness of their cause to confront tyranny. But in writing about a Gandhian moment, I do not wish to focus on such collective instances of nonviolent protest, but on the process of the mental and spiritual struggle that changes individuals within and helps create conditions in which the meaning of political action can be transformed. In this sense, the Gandhian moment is about reorientation, about individuals engaged in the struggle to reconceive themselves and their relationship with the state. To say that the Gandhian moment is at root about a new way of thinking might be to play into the hands of those who view Gandhi’s approach to political and social transformations as naïve, unpractical, and utopian or to sound like one who romanticizes Gandhi and Gandhism, but rarely notices the muddy world of practical politics. But as we consider Gandhi’s ideas and how they challenge the theoretical positions of the most dominant political views in the early twenty-first century, we should never forget that his ideas have had immense practical consequences around the globe. Nor should we make the mistake of thinking that Gandhi’s ideas are only about strategy, about specific methods of avoiding violence. They are also relevant, for example, to the age-old divide between “private” and “public” that was theorized and sanctified by modern liberal thinkers like Benjamin Constant and blessed by American and French revolutionaries, which lives on in the ideas and practices of today’s political parties. It is a dichotomy challenged by the Gandhian assertion that political action must take note of moral duty as much as individual rights. Gandhi opened up space for new kinds of political agency where politics is represented as a process of creative engagement with others to transform an unjust political situation into one that is more just. If, as is now clear, Gandhi sought to alter the meaning of political action by calling attention to the duties of citizens as much as their rights, this logically calls to mind the next question: just how did Gandhi determine the social and political role of the citizen beyond the state?

The core of Gandhi’s theory of politics is to show that the true subject of the political is the citizen and not the state. In other words, in Gandhi’s mind the citizen always stands higher than the state. This is why the question of “duty” remained of so much importance to Gandhi. In the Gandhian moment, the political subject embraces moral duty and frees himself or herself from ultimate obedience to existing political powers, thus inverting our common idea of who is sovereign. Gandhi famously wrote: “It is a fundamental principle of satyagraha [truth-force] that the tyrant, whom the satyagrahi seeks to resist, has power over his body and material possessions, but he can have no power over the soul. The soul can remain unconquered and unconquerable even when the body is imprisoned.”² Moving beyond fear allows the politics of Gandhi to move beyond the sovereign law that creates authority. For Gandhi, political subjects are not created by sovereign authorities, but sovereign authorities are created by and share sovereignty with politically active subjects. Gandhi described the precondition for legality and legitimacy as the political consent of the citizens and not the power of the state, rule of the rule itself. The problem for him is not just who rules, but the whole structure of sovereign rule. Gandhi sought to detheologize and desecularize the secularized theological concept of modern politics manifested in the omnipotent sovereign that Thomas Hobbes argued we must all obey or otherwise risk anarchy. Gandhi’s emphasis on citizens’ ethical duties undercut Hobbesian political authority and required citizens under certain conditions to disobey the state and its laws, undeterred by fear. Gandhi’s political practice was based on the taming of Hobbesian fear. In Hind Swaraj, he wrote, “Passive resistance cannot proceed a step without fearlessness. Those alone can follow the path of passive resistance who are free from fear, whether as to their possession, false honors, their relatives, the government, bodily injury, death.”³ In order to give meaning to the concept of nonviolence as a moment of “shared sovereignty” and to free modern politics from the hold of godlike sovereign powers, Gandhi presented the idea of shared sovereignty as a regulatory principle and, at the same time, a guarantee that there is a limit to the abusive use of political power. It is also a principle that has meaning only with reference to the idea of responsibility. The major shift in focus that appears in Gandhian debate is from the common idea that political legitimacy is derived from political power to the idea that legitimacy is derived from the sphere of the ethical, an idea that gives crucial weight to the responsibility and duty of citizens to act ethically. Gandhi’s challenge to the modern state was, therefore, not just to the ground of its legitimacy but to its basic rationale itself. The Gandhian principle of nonviolence is presented as a challenge to the violence that is always and necessarily implicated with the foundation of a sovereign order. Gandhi’s critique of modern politics led 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 an “ethics of togetherness” that brings together ethics, politics, and religion. This Gandhian moment of politics also leads to the possibility of a synthesis between the two concepts of individual autonomy and nonviolent action. Gandhi succeeded in making new words of ancient wisdom by turning the Hindu and Jain concept of “ahimsa” (avoidance of violence) into a civic temperament and a democratic commitment.

To understand all this better, to see how Gandhi viewed the advancement of democracy as intertwined with the goal of overturning our ideas about sovereignty, this book will proceed by studying various concepts at the heart of Gandhi’s philosophy, show how he responded to contemporary critics and supporters, and move on to consider how some of his followers developed and used his ideas after his death. To that end, the next chapter contains an in-depth examination of principles of Gandhian politics, all of them linked to the philosophical core of Gandhi’s nonviolence. In a way, nonviolence and autonomy converge in Gandhi’s philosophy, for as the chapter demonstrates, Gandhi always saw the enemy as lack of autonomy, either individual or collective. Chapter 3 is a study of Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization. As we will see, Gandhi developed the idea of “civilization” as a quest for the ultimate meaning of human existence and opposed this to the idea that modern civilization is simply newly acquired mastery over nature through modern science and over humans through modern politics. Gandhi also considered civilization as a dialogical process, one in which the East and West meet and transform each other. Chapter 4 moves from philosophy toward practice, tracing the development of Gandhi’s public philosophy and the idea of “solidaristic empathy” as the unifying principle of his nonviolent democratic theory. Chapter 5 presents his ideas in dialogue with those of selected critics and supporters who were his contemporaries. Among his supporters, particular attention is paid to two Muslims unheralded in the West: Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Maulana Azad. Chapter 6 elaborates on the legacy of Gandhian politics after his death and explores the Gandhian moment as a key to helping civic movements to form a politics of dissent and resistance while navigating the journey from enmity to friendship. The conclusion touches on current affairs to discuss the rapidly changing world of violence in, especially, Iran and the Middle East.

The most important thesis of this book is simple: the Gandhian moment is possible. Nonviolence is premised on the existence of a universal ethical imperative that transcends religious and cultural particularities and is channeled through local, grassroots movements. The Gandhian moment was not particular to the Indian independence movement, the American civil rights movement, the dismantling of Apartheid in South Africa, or the plight of Tibet. It emerges, rather, as a viable and sustainable mode of challenging absolute sovereignty and domination in all times and places and for all peoples. To help root and advance these claims, the remainder of this chapter will take us back to the beginning of Gandhian thought, to Gandhi himself, partly to remind us of the connections between Gandhi’s ideas and his life and times, but also to underline that Gandhi never thought of his ideas as relevant only to his own context.

“I am,” affirmed Gandhi, “not built on academic writings. Action is my domain.”⁴ All through his life and struggles, Mahatma Gandhi expressed a profound respect for work in the public sphere. Some have attributed his love of public life to the fact that he was trained as a lawyer, but Gandhi himself put little stock in his legal training. In considering Gandhi’s views on politics in general, it is necessary to understand that his interest in public work arose from his acute sensitivity to injustice and inequality and his passion for the ideas of freedom and pluralism. Gandhi’s political work offers numerous lessons for us today. The overarching aim of this work was not to end the colonial domination of India, but to achieve something deeper and more spiritual: to bridge the gap between the practical and the ethical. Gandhi restored politics to its rightful place by emphasizing the harmonious interaction and compatibility among the political, economic, and spiritual. Whatever one may be tempted to believe about Gandhi as a political leader or religious character, it is clear that for him the goal of the struggle for freedom was not only to achieve political independence, but also to establish intercultural and interfaith dialogue among different religious traditions.

Gandhi did not practice law for his own financial comfort or pleasure. He similarly believed that the goal of the law was not to advance the narrow interests of a particular racial, ethnic, or social group, but rather the political and ethical education of citizens in general. It is no coincidence that alongside his struggle for political freedom from British colonial rule, Gandhi sought to fight for a just civil society. Gandhi developed a comprehensive view of political action that became the source of his strength. Although his personal trajectory prior to his departure for South Africa as a young lawyer in 1893 was one of gradual learning, what one can learn of this period by reading Gandhi’s Autobiography is how early he began to question conventional frameworks in what he called his “experiment with truth.” Gandhi recollected some of his early experiences with the prejudice or ignorance of his immediate entourage. Unlike many other children from a Hindu background, Gandhi had an Islamic childhood friend, a boy by the name of Sheikh Mehtab, who tried to convince him to eat meat to make him strong like the British. Also at an early age, Gandhi refused to consider untouchables as sinful, and he told his mother that it was wrong not to have any physical contact with them. These early forays into bridging cultural divides were isolated, but they had an impact on Gandhi’s future struggles for Hindu-Muslim unity and against untouchability. Gandhi’s sense of respect for others and his love of justice led him to study law in London at the age of nineteen and then on to South Africa. In South Africa, Gandhi increasingly distanced himself from the traditional methods of the Indian National Congress, which entailed petitioning the authorities and holding endless meetings, and instead developed his satyagraha strategy through his readings of Henry David Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is within You, and John Ruskin’s Unto This Last. But the major lessons he learned arose from the humiliation and discrimination he experienced as a dark-skinned resident of South Africa. On the basis of his experiences, Gandhi came to the conclusion that unjust laws were to be violated because the sacred duty of every citizen was not to participate in evil. Thus Gandhi’s conception of citizenship and his idea of a good civil society were inextricably linked to his ideas about justice. Gandhi knew only too well that injustice under law can be vastly more unethical than an injustice that is bound by no laws at all. All this helps to explain why between 1907 and 1913 Gandhi worked so hard to perfect a nonviolent technique for political action. Thanks to his nonviolent methods, Gandhi won himself a leading role and became an object of public attention in his relentless campaigns for the rights of Indians in South Africa. By the time of his return to India in 1915, Gandhi had become politically self-confident enough to take on the British rule of his native country and to try to put into place a constructive program for post-colonial India.

According to Rajmohan Gandhi, “Unlike other politicians, Gandhi had seen (from the start of his South African days) the interconnectedness, practical and moral, of three questions. Hindus would not deserve freedom from alien rule if they continued to treat a portion among them as untouchables; and caste Hindus were unlikely to obtain Swaraj [self-rule] if untouchables opposed it. And if they fought each other, Hindus and Muslims would neither merit nor attain independence.”⁵ Confident in his nonviolent methods, which he considered more effective in the long term than violent resistance, Gandhi thus seemed fully aware by 1915 of his ethical legitimacy and the practicality of entering India’s political scene. Gandhi commenced his political life in India with a conception of politics as resting on a human capacity to organize a dialogical society. Gandhi’s critical understanding of modernity and his intercultural approach to Indian traditions provided him with a strategy of connecting the elites and the masses through the method of satyagraha. Over the years, from his first campaigns in Champaran to help the peasants against British landlords to his later support for a strike over wages in Ahmedabad, and on until January 30, 1948, when he held his last prayer meeting before being shot three times by Nathuram Godse, Gandhi brought the ethical and the political into dialogue with each other. By breaking away from rigid caste distinctions and communal prejudices and by investing himself body and mind in the Indian public sphere, Gandhi thought and practiced a conception of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Gandhi’s Inversion of Modern Political Perception
• 2. Principles of Gandhian Politics
• 3. The Critique of Modern Civilization
• 4. Gandhi’s Public Philosophy: Linking the Moral with the Political
• 5. Gandhi’s Reception in India
• 6. Gandhi and Beyond
• 7. Conclusion: Gandhi Today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index