Contemporizing Gandhi: Some Reflections on Principles and Praxis

- By Sanjeev Kumar, Kumar Rahul, Rubul Patgiri*

Introduction

Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 at the hands of a fanatic stirred the conscience of the entire nation. Much water has flown since then. His assassination cannot be dismissed as a sporadic act of individual violence. It was an act of organized violence, a product of deep-sheeted conflict. India’s claimed development story has also exposed other conflicts that range from individual violence to civilizational violence. Gandhi's life has been a saga of his struggle against such conflicts that reflect various forms of violence in society.

Much of the contemporary conflicts are recurrences of the past. The central thesis of this paper is to contemporize Gandhi, oscillating between ‘his time’ and ‘ours’, amid spells of despair and doubts on his contemporariness. To this end, this paper describes initiatives undertaken by individuals and groups, which later acquired the currency of a Gandhian movement.

Interpretations of Gandhi are contested. The interpretative plurality of his politics and writings problematizes a canonical understanding of Gandhi. For example, in his lifetime and after, he has been understood and interpreted both as a conservative and a radical; as a saint and a politician; as a liberal Hindu and a secular-socialist. His iconography ranges from being messianic to a persistent problematizer. Many in India and the West, especially a section of the youth, cast doubts on his relevance today. Some dismiss ‘Hind Swaraj’, his seminal text, as a lost discourse. This article intends to take issues with such views. Realizing the voluminous nature of the Gandhian literature, the article stresses a re-reading of Gandhi, both textually and contextually. Our view is that Gandhi's re-reading is not a choice we can afford to ignore, it is rather an ontic necessity today for philosophers and political practitioners alike. Resisting the temptation to touch upon many flagrant contemporary issues, we limit to discussing just three. First, as against attempts to Hindutvize Gandhi in the political discourse of community and culture, this paper makes a case for a cosmopolitan Gandhi. Second, it stresses the value of Satyagraha in the face of continued structural and cultural violence. And, third, amidst hyper majoritarianism, it underlines the value of deliberative democracy that Hind Swaraj has on offer.

We find that a populist generality mar claims to Gandhi's legacy. Social workers, politicians across the polemic spectrum, social movements, government agencies and corporates are claiming him indiscriminately. He is a brand ambassador of Government policies and business entrepreneurs. For example, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, popularly known as MGNREGA, was enacted in deference to his socialist-egalitarian ethos of Gram-Swaraj and his concern for the livelihood security¹ of the rural poor.

’Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’, one of the widely acclaimed flagship programmes of the Government of India, is a tribute² to Mahatma Gandhi in pursuit of his constructive programme. Bihar Chief Minister, Mr. Nitish Kumar, profusely invokes Mahatma Gandhi as a preface to the Government's ban on consuming liquor. While speaking in Bihar Legislative Council, he says that “those who drink liquor are sinners.... those who are not following Mahatma Gandhi are not even Hindustani”.³ In several parts of India and the world, social movements and new social movements, small and big, fighting for tribal rights, ecological rights, Dalit rights, acclaim Gandhi as an inspiration. Their imperativeness is understandable. It is troubling, however, to see mindless industrialists and corporates, who Gandhi thought were products of the satanic civilizations, also swearing by Gandhi and using him as a marketing ambassador! For example, in 2009, Mont Blanc, a Swiss company, used Gandhi's image to promote the sale of a fountain pen priced at £ 15,500⁴. It marked a huge controversy. It was contrary to the spirit of asceticism that characteristically defined the civic virtue of Gandhi's life. Amit Modi, the then Secretary of Sabarmati Ashram, which Gandhi had founded in 1915 on his return from South Africa to promote the values of radical egalitarianism and simplicity, expressed dismay at the product and remarked, “if he (Mahatma Gandhi) had seen this, he would have thrown it away”⁵. Vijay Mallya, a liquor baron, an industrialist accused of multi-crore bank fraud, bided in the auction of Gandhi’s memorabilia, such as his glass, watch, and sandals, and bought them for 1.8 million US dollars⁶. What a travesty! When Gandhi was going abroad for higher studies, his mother had given the vow to stay away from three vices. Mallya represents all of them in one! It is indeed an interesting phenomenon: the encroacher and the encroached, the violator and the violated, the exploiter and the exploited invoke Gandhi with brazen generality.

In February 2019, invoking a 2013 land acquisition law, the Jharkhand government acquired a huge piece of fertile land (about 2385.28 Acre) for the Adani group to establish a 1600 MW power plant in Godda district, one of the poorest regions of Jharkhand⁷. The power generated in this plant is meant to be sold to Bangladesh. According to a report, it has displaced 5339 persons from 841 families⁸. Each displaced family was given Rs. 50,000 as one-time compensation and Rs.3000/- per month for one year⁹. Santhals are worst among the displaced communities. They are an aboriginal indigenous tribe, culturally and spiritually connected to the land for thousands of years. According to an Amnesty International Report, “Adivasis have suffered disproportionately in India’s development-induced displacement and environmental destruction¹⁰.” Hundreds of protestors have been forcibly put behind the bars. According to another report titled, ‘Homeless in Our Own Homeland’, about 20 million people have been displaced in India, mostly Dalits and Adivasis, in past 50 years on account of industrial investments, mines corporates, dams, etc.¹¹, Adivasi and Dalit villagers have sought justice from the High Court, accusing that irregularities and illegalities marred the entire land acquisition process. An environmental scientist¹² has also moved to the National Green Tribunal, challenging environmental clearance for the Adani group thermal power project. Even the Gram Sabha resolutions against land acquisition have been ignored and flouted¹³. Asa reward, cops raided the house of the report's author and slapped him with sedition charges. In 2018, several Human rights activists were raided and imprisoned in Yerwarda Jail. Coincidentally, Gandhi was a frequent visitor to the Yerwada Jail. In 1922, he was sentenced 6-year imprisonment for similar charges, i.e., writing three articles in Indian Opinion. He was kept in Yerwada Jail. Gandhi was again arrested in 1932 and 1933 and put there as a prisoner.

If we could phenomenalize the imagined conversation between Gandhi and these rights activists in Yerwada, Gandhi would have certainly invigorated them of their resolve to praxis Satyagraha in times when the power-elite and the oligarchy have seemingly joined hands to perpetrate systematic, structural and civilizational violence over the weak and destitute. Contemporizing Satyagraha today, therefore, calls for a nuanced understanding of violence.

Satyagraha in the face of ‘civilizational Violence’

Manifestation of violence today is much more complex and insidious than it’s Hobbesian understanding. It has many dimensions¹⁴: individual violence, psychological violence, structural violence, cultural violence and civilizational violence. The fear of individual violence, i.e., a person killing another, has been all-pervasive. More subdued than the former is the fear of domination, an example of psychological violence. When a large section or group of the society is deprived of their due share in economic resources, societal heritage, honour, respect, and dignity by systematic subjugation; this is structural violence. When we close our eyes and allow such injustices to happen, this is cultural violence. And, when the ‘self ‘or our agency is denied to acquire the cognitive capacity to discover bestness in long-cherished ethos of the antiquity and moralities founded in ‘dharma’, we may call it ‘civilizational violence’. Gandhi, both as a colonial subject and as a citizen of an independent nation, underwent all forms of violence.

Hence, his exposition about Satyagraha should be conceptualized by recovering the historicity of all forms of violence he has been subjected to. Evidently, he is most worried and serious about the civilizational violence. No wonder, he turned out to be one of the most ardent critics of modern civilization. He thought it distorts the true picture of the self, denying individuals the possibility of ‘knowing themselves’.

‘Knowing oneself’ was Gandhi's prime project in Hind Swaraj. He tells us, “Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passion. So doing we know ourselves.¹⁵ This is the core idea of Swaraj. He further clarifies, “...if we become free, India is free. And in this thought is a definition of Swaraj. It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. It is therefore in the palm of our hands. Do not consider this swaraj to be like a dream. ....Such Swaraj has to be experienced by each one for himself¹⁶.”

It is important to assess how we stand today in the face of the enormity of structural and cultural violence. The Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science, carried out a nuanced piece of ethnographic research, which mainly investigated reasons that account for the pauperization of Dalits and Adivasis across India. It was known as the Programme of Research on Inequality and Poverty¹⁷. The research concluded that the exploitation of Dalits and Adivasis occurs through three interrelated processes: 1. Inherited inequalities of power, 2. Circular seasonal migrant casual labor, 3. Subjection to conjugated oppression, which means that their social exploitation is intertwined with exploitative class relations¹⁸, They are the worst-off group in terms of access to land, education, jobs, and power. They are subjected to land alienation by the governments, which they charge behave like agents of corporates rather than as the elected representative. Vigilante beatings, rape, and even killings of Adivasis and Dalits, reinforce their conjugated oppression. The report also suggests that even though they want to resist, they are intimidated by the dire consequences of protesting. Even intellectuals and human rights activists protesting these oppressions have been raided. The report says that their voices are silenced and even dubbed as ‘anti-nationals’.

The Planning Commission of India also set up an ‘Expert Group’ in 2006. The report, titled as ‘Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Area’, was submitted to the Commission in 2008 and published by the Government of India in the same year. The summary of the report is a painful story of gruesome structural violence. Even after more than seven decades of India’s Independence, Dalits “continue to face wide-ranging economic, social disadvantages, and day to day humiliation and degradation, denial of justice and violent atrocities in India”¹⁹. The condition of Adivasis and women is similar. A whopping “80 percent of Dalits and 92 percent of Adivasis live in rural areas²⁰”, Additionally, women undergo triple jeopardy. They suffer economic, social and gender injustice on a daily basis. These groups have been victims of all forms of displacement: physical, occupational, and cultural. The Report says that “whereas the tribals constitute 8.08% of the country’s population, they are 40% of the total displaced/affected persons by the projects. Similarly, at least 20% of the displaced /affected are Dalits, and another 20% are OBCs. The resettlement record [of the government] is also very dismal. Only a third of the displaced persons of planned development have been resettled²¹.”

This is indeed a sad state of affairs. Successive post independent governments till today, of the union and the states, have simply used the iconography of Gandhi in a discriminately selective and symbolic manner. Naming certain welfare schemes after Gandhi is driven more by instrumental courtesy than a genuine deferential tribute. We wish to flag two issues here: First, Gandhi's India lived in villages. For him, villages were the microcosm of happiness to be achieved through ethics of ‘voluntary simplicity’, participatory democracy, and multiculturality. Today, Gandhi’s villages are in more distress than ever. Doors are wide open for foreign capital investment, which requires huge piece of cheap land and cheap labour usually available in rural areas. These areas are predominantly populated by the poor and the destitute, Gandhi's ‘last man’. It is easier for the governments to acquire land for the foreign capital investors by quelling resistance, as they continue to be the most vulnerable sections of the society.

Eventually, they lose access to their land and homeland, furrow and forest, ecology, and environment.

Our second concern in this paper is to underline the infection of cultural violence today. It is breeding at a fast pace. The urban population seems happy with the capital investments and labour migration. Probably because they think they are not affected and are not losing their land. They are either happy or have closed their eyes at the enormity of the rural distress, which is symptomatic of an insidious process of cultural violence. We have ignored Gandhi’s picture of the nation, drawn in Hind Swaraj. Basic moral sensibilities to empathise with the distressed people, victims of the othering process underlying dehumanising development, are fading away. The worse, the institutionalisation of indifference in deriving pleasure out of ‘others’ pain is what we may call ‘cultural violence’. Furthermore, the acculturation of the dichotomy between the self and the other solidifies cultural violence.

Notably, infliction of cultural violence is an offshoot of civilizational violence. In passages of Hind Swaraj, Gandhi spotted the malaise in the body of Indian civilization. However, he is short of saying that the disease has infected its moral fibre. If Gandhi were to write a revised edition of Hind Swaraj today, he would probably add a full chapter on the Critique of Indian Civilization as well. Although in the 1909 edition, he attacked some of the continuing corrupt and oppressive traditions of the Indian Civilization, he would be more scathing in his critique in the revised edition. Quoting Edward Carpenter, who calls civilization a disease, Gandhi says, “civilization is not an incurable disease²²”. Given Gandhi's propensity to accept critiques, he would argue the same thing about the Indian civilization today. Gandhi lived under the Independent Indian Government just for five months and fourteen days. Based on what we see today, a large populace under a spate of structural violence would attack the successive Indian governments more scathingly than he did against the British government, for inadequate anti-discrimination, anti-deprivation, and anti-displacement frameworks for the most vulnerable sections of the society.

In the face of all this, the works of noted Gandhians, Ela Bhatt and Himanshu Kumar, are like what can be truly called contemporary satyagraha. Reasons for mentioning their works here are twofold: the purity of principles and methods they employed and principled voluntariness with which they internalised disruptions to their lives as the foreseen aftermath, much akin to what Gandhi did and faced. However, the mention of the two cast doubts on the purity and integrity of other professed Gandhian initiatives and movements underway in several parts of India and elsewhere. Such stories deserve academic mention. We strongly believe that Gandhi belongs as much to the arena of praxis as to the academic texts.

Himanshu Kumar, a young scholar-activist, inherited the Gandhian value system in pedigree. His father lived with Gandhi in Sewagram and travelled across India with Vinoba Bhave during the Bhoodan movement²³. At the young age of 27, he put in practice Gandhi's advice to go and live in villages and work for the poor. Gandhi was well aware of structural unfreedom, a disgrace of Indian society. Some social and economic practices over time, acquire legitimacy; thereby, they become norms. In turn, they become part of our daily social life and cultural ecosystem. This is when we start calling them structures. Quite some time, they obstruct the fuller realization of our ‘self’ and pursuit of autonomously defined goals. For example, ‘poverty and social inequality’ is a stark condition of ‘structural unfreedom’. Gandhi was well aware of it, which is why he romanticised ‘voluntary poverty²⁴ and ‘voluntary simplicity'²⁵. They are necessary components of Satyagraha. They enable persons to embrace the truth. Imbued with Gandhi, Himanshu’s father, a true satyagrahi by volition, wanted the country’s youth to work in villages and bring about freedom from poverty, deprivation, and discrimination in homes of the poorest of the poor, Gandhi's ‘last man’. He told us about his visit to Dantewada along with his father and noted Gandhian Nirmala Desh Pandey²⁶. In 1992, he chose to work in a remote village of Dantewada, one of the country’s most Maoist violence-affected regions. He chose Dantewada because he wanted to experiment if the Gandhian principle of non-violence works in one of the country’s most violent regions. Himanshu notes that the region was one of the worst victims of structural violence. He founded Vanvaasi Chetna Ashram there and started providing elementary education, community health services, and advocacy for Adivasi rights. Gandhi's critique of modern education, modern medicine, and his views on Adivasis informed his initiatives. He filed about 600 cases on behalf of Adivasis against state atrocities. When asked what happened with those cases, he replied that the state had managed their successive adjournments in the last twenty years²⁷. Hence, experiments in democratic, legal, non-violent, methods of seeking justice for them proved to be ineffective. In 2009, his Vanoasi Chetna Ashram was demolished by the state. His answer to the final question is most interesting. So how does he think Gandhi would have acted in today’s situation? He replied, “Gandhi believed in two basic principles: one, nobody should endure injustice. Two, we should not remain silent when we see injustice being done to others. Gandhi would definitely have spoken out. [But] If Gandhi was alive today, he'd be in jail in Dantewada²⁸, [for being with the Adivasis’ cause]. In these lines lies the essence of Satyagraha. It is not about achieving the targeted result. It is, instead, about training people against enduring injustices. It is about self-informing about taking a considered call on bringing about civic and social change through self-purification and constructive programme. Such training requires what we call ‘principled voluntariness’ to bear the consequences, not to run away from them. Himanshu Kumar’s work is stirring. As a young lad at 27, he chose to do what many of us would not even imagine to do. That too, in a region that has tragic history of the most dreadful violence. It is a living example of satyagraha. It requires courage and fearlessness, essential attributes of a satyagrahi. It affirms again that it is not a weapon of the weak. It is a method of securing rights by personal suffering. It’s not simply a theory of social and political change. Rather, it is a theory of ethical change. Gandhian ethics rivulets from dharma, which is to govern Individual self-rule (Swaraj) and social and political institutions.

Another example is that of Ela Bhatt. A Gandhian by volition, Ela Bhatt has been honoured with Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan, and Ramon Magsaysay awards. She founded SEWA-Self Employed Women’s Association in 1972 with the aim to bring about economic swaraj for millions of women²⁹. SEWA was born out of the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association, whose constitution was written by Mahatma Gandhi himself. Her story of how she suffered ridicule and harassment of the bureaucratic machinery whenever she wanted to poor women’s cooperative bank registered, association of wage labourers, a cooperative of ragpickers, midwives, vegetable growers and vendors etc. raises questions on the self-claimed role of the state as an agent of social change. Notwithstanding the ridicule on innumerable occasions, as Gandhi too faced in his days, with more than 100 such cooperatives, SEWA has ushered into the mainstream of nation’s economy. Like Western industrial countries, India has also imitated the practice of categorising trades, she laments. What it means is that for an economic activity to be called a trade or a business, it must qualify definitional standards. It was difficult to withstand Indian occupational realities, where a large number of the working population in the unorganised sector changes the nature of activity with the change of season. In an interview with Katherine Marshall, she laments that ‘poverty is violence and it happens with the consent of the society³⁰, which the country’s armchair policymakers should be mindful of. Ela Bhatt’s works are truly inspiring. Amidst despair, her relentless efforts give us the hope that the possibility of swaraj is not farfetched. Swaraj is empowerment; it is a climate of freedom; it is an imagery of economic possibility. Her endeavours of ‘constructing a language of economic diversity'³¹ and ‘cultivating subjects for community economy'³² give us hope for a swaraj-driven economy in the face of a welfare-liberal claim that the state is a viable economic moderniser to trust and the counter-claim that the neoliberal project of competitive individualism is the sole harbinger of economic prosperity.

We need a cosmopolitan Gandhi

A parochial narrative of nationalism is underway in India and elsewhere. Intuitively, it is too farfetched to believe that people at large in India are buying this narrative. We have no procedural devices to estimate the ‘popular will’. In aggregative democracies, psephological devices can gauge the mood of the electorate; incapable, however, to estimate quantifiably and qualitatively the ‘popular will’, as Rousseau and Gandhi³³ premised it. While the popular will is expressed only if the individual can form an enlightened understanding of the issue, as swaraj entails, the political will always rest on a tailor-stitched majority. The latter reduces democracy to a game of strategic behavior. This is not the kind of democracy Gandhi wanted. Some argue³⁴ that a conformist politics of militarizing nationalism as the nation’s political will is underway. The refusal is fraught with fear, hatred, trolling and dreaded violence³⁵. Politics of exclusivist majoritarianism often justifies instrumental violence. Gandhi disapproved both, the idea of exclusivist nationalism and majoritarian democracy, and the means of fear and violence for effectuating them. Textualizing a few passages from his writings will help. The epistemology of textualizing, however, is such that it produces contested hermeneutic interpretations. Gandhi too, has not been spared from the politics of epistemic appropriation. To textualize Douglas Allen's observation, “there are multiple Gandhis and multiple ways of analyzing his thought and action³⁶. Gandhi's writings are overtly mired in religious language, and he frequently draws on the metaphysical sources of Hinduism. Hence, some fall prey to the temptation of canonizing him under Hindu Political Thought. To reclaim him against such canonization is both an epistemic necessity and a nationalistic duty. In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi held the view that India was an undivided land unified by holy places located in all directions, therefore, one nation³⁷. Problematizing the idea of ‘one land-one nation’, Gandhi's ‘reader’³⁸ in Hind Swaraj asks, “you have described to me the India of the pre-Mahomedan period, but now we have Mahomedans (Muslims), Parsees and Christians. How can they be one nation?³⁹" His ‘reader’ in the dialogue comprises his friends, including Pranjivan Mehta, Shyamji Krishnavarma and V.D. Savarkar, to whom Gandhi is responding⁴⁰. ”....those who are conscious of the spirit of nationality do not interfere with one-another’s religion. If they do, they are not fit to be considered a nation. If the Hindus believe that India should be peopled only by Hindus, they are living in dreamland. The Hindus, the Mahomedans, the Parsees, and the Christians who have made India their country are fellow countrymen, and they will have to live in unity. In no part of the world are one nationality and one religion synonymous terms: nor has it ever been so in India⁴¹, he wrote in Hind Swaraj. From this thought springs up the idea of ‘unity in diversity’, which alone is the foundational principle of Indian nationalism. Gandhi recurrently echoed this idea of nationalism throughout his life. In 1927, he wrote in ‘Young India’: “I do not expect India of my dream to develop one religion, i.e., to be wholly Hindu or wholly Christian, or wholly Musalman, but I want it to be wholly tolerant, with its religions working side by side with one another.⁴² In 1931, he warned us: “It has been said that Indian swargj will be the rule of the majority community, i.e., Hindus. There could not be a greater mistake than that. If it were to be true, I would refuse to call it swaraj and would fight it with all strength at my command, for to me Hind Swaraj is the rule of all people, is the rule of justice⁴³. In 1932, he wrote again in Young India: “The rule of majority has a narrow application. .... It is slavery to be amenable to the majority, no matter what its decisions are. Democracy is not a state in which people act like sheep. Under democracy, individual liberty of opinion and action is jealously guarded. I, therefore, believe that the minority has a perfect right to act differently from the majority.⁴⁴" In these lines lies a Gandhian conception, rather Indian conception of nationalism. Cosmopolitan impulses in him are arresting. In Hind Swaraj and elsewhere, he stretches his idea of nationalism beyond the Hind. His swaraj is not to be confined to the Hind. It is borderless. He supplies us with a cosmic framework for thinking and theorizing. As he puts it, humankind is like a cosmos, where all bodies are connected with each other with some cosmic (life) energy. All humans are endowed with souls. It is a repository of cosmic energy.

It is the thread of moral spirit through which a person’s self is organically connected with the selves of other persons.⁴⁵ Dwelling on the Gita as a metaphysical source, he advises us to see “our ‘self’ in all creatures, and all creatures in our ‘self.’ So doing he provides the self-other framework of relationship an egalitarian and cosmic outlook⁴⁶. This thought has immense empirical value. Uncritical nationalism based on fear, hatred and violence can potentially unleash a process of ‘othering’. Gandhi wrote in 1921, “For me patriotism is the same as humanity. I am patriotic because | am human and humane. It is not exclusive."⁴⁷ His nationalism is inclusive to the extent of embracing the humanity into its arm. “My love for nationalism or my idea of nationalism is that my country may become free, that if need be the whole of the country may die, so that human race may live. There is no room for race hatred there. Let that be our nationalism.”⁴⁸

He has turned alive theorizing around the idea of cosmos. Thus, we have a Gandhi pointing us to what we call a ‘cosmopolitan dharma”⁴⁹. Gandhi's usage of the concept of ‘dharma’ has not received nuanced treatment. Some see in Gandhi's preoccupation with dharma a Hindu thinker, others bring him closer to Kant’s categorical imperative, and yet others describe him as a reformed liberal, privileging a liberal doctrine of political obligation. These are essentialist framings. This won't allow us to fathom the cosmopolitan dharma. Key to the understanding of the cosmos are twin notions of the self and the other, sharing the same spiritual plank, the same source of energy (life), the same sense of origin, and rootedness. Gandhi’s dharma is supreme religiosity⁵⁰, not religion. It is luminosity, which goes beyond light. For, religion as faith can be territorially barriered while religiosity travels across borders. A light source cannot see the ‘other’ side of the object, but luminosity can. This world where we live is like a cosmos. Each unit in the cosmos is important because it has the same amount of cosmic spirit. The moral value of each life therefore is equal; each nation has equal sovereign worth. The point is to be cognizant of this egalitarian cosmopolitan doctrine. Gandhi advises us to acquire cognitive capacity to recognize this egalitarian cosmopolitan impulse, which has been eclipsed by civilizational violence. It has a message for hegemonic nations to stop ‘othering’ smaller nations, within and outside. This is, according to Gandhi, our ‘dharmic-duty’. It enables us to know ‘what we owe to each-others’⁵¹, a question that has set the tone for today’s global justice debate. We need to reaffirm the normative commitment that we owe others a lot, therefore we need Gandhi today more than ever before. Gandhi's dharma has a cosmopolitan moral theory in which individuals are experientially motivated to acquire cognitive capacity to see all people as ends in themselves and to aspire to love oneself and others to the point of regarding them as part of oneself⁵².

Gandhi has a cosmopolitan presence both in terms of readership and iconography. We need him today for the normative commitment to be legitimately accepted and practiced. We live in a global order in which economic and hegemonic asymmetries mark our lives. Asymmetries are not only inter-regional or inter-national. Rather, they are intra-regional and intra-national. While some nations and regions prosper, others fight the demon of structural deprivation and hegemonic domination. Even within a nation, some groups are facing structural violence. We need Gandhi today to continually remind us what we owe others and why.

Gandhi as a deliberative democrat?

Inklings of deliberative democracy in Gandhi's writings are visible. There is a danger, however, in conceptualizing Gandhi this way. He is a persistent problematizer. His writings refuse to fit in essentialist framings supplied by the Western political theory. So, to say that he sounds like a deliberative democrat, we again fall back in the essentialist trap. We are familiar with a Western conception of deliberative democracy, developed most notably in the writings of John Rawls, Habermas, Joshua Cohen, Seyla Benhabib, Dryzek etc. We may lose a bit of Gandhi’s originality in attempting to fit him in the essentialist framework of deliberative democracy. Our attempt is, therefore, limited to outlining the premise of deliberative democracy: 1. It encourages effective participation of the people in the democratic process by way of enabling them to gain an enlightened understanding of the issue at hand. 2. It critiques majoritarian democracy for being excessively aggregative, which reduces democracy to the strategic management of the majority vote at any point of time. 3. It believes in the power of public dialogue, democratic dissent, appeal to the public reason and informed criticism. Deliberative democrats believe in the transformative potential of dialogue, which can evoke a change in the views of the overwhelming majority by making a rational appeal to public morality. Given this yardstick, impulses of deliberative democracy are overwhelming in Gandhi's writings. The literary genre of Hind Swaraj is dialogical. Gandhi harps on the argumentative tradition of the Indian civilization; therefore, he chose to present his views in the form of a dialogue. The ‘reader’ in the text is supposedly his critics, with whom Gandhi is having a dialogue. Throughout the dialogue, he consistently and patiently appreciates his critics and tries to converse by appealing to public morality. He wanted his writings to undergo informed criticism so that the truth may be filtered on successive revisions. “The only motive is to serve the country. If my views are proved to be wrong, I shall have no hesitation in rejecting them,”⁵³ Gandhi wrote in the Preface to Hind Swaraj. He further opines, “it’s a bad habit to say that... those having different views from ours are enemies of the country”⁵⁴. His views sound so contemporary as if he brought out Hind Swaraj only yesterday!

Hind Swaraj can never be a lost discourse. It is as contemporary as it was in 1909, Every successive reading is more revealing than the earlier. All immersive readers even today would get goosebumps as if he is scolding them for not doing as much as they can and they should; as if Gandhi was portraying the picture of contemporary Indian society, as if he is describing the present Indian middle class, the present political class and the contemporary exercisers of political authority. From hypocrite religious leaders to self-proclaimed nationalists, from the power elite to the majoritarian democrats, from lawyers, judges, educationists to modern medical professionals-everyone would receive Gandhi's chiding even today! The politics of fear alongside symbolic appropriation of Gandhi through the length of post-independent India, as expressed and argued by Gandhians and critics alike, that Gandhi would have been jailed even today for voicing the concerns of Adivasis, for critiquing a development model that distances and displaces the indigenous people from their dwelling, for speaking against exclusivist majoritarian nationalism and for making a case for a cosmopolitan dharma, for being sensitive to the ecology, for training the citizenry in the virtue of conscientious dissenting, is to contested by a transformative politics of satyagraha, which is why we need Gandhi today more imperatively than ever.

Notes and References

1. The Gazette of India Extraordinary Part-II, New Delhi, September 7, 2005, P.1.
2. SwachhBharat- Swachh Bharat Abhiyan a nation-wide campaign in India (mygov.in) accessed on 3 May 2022.
3. Indian Express, 1 April 2022.
4. Gandhi's birthday marked with opulence by Montblanc | India | The Guardian, accessed on 3 May 2022.
5. Financial Times, 30 September 2009, Fountains of dismay greet ‘Gandhi pen’ | Financial Times (ft.com) accessed on 3 May 2022.
6. Economic Times, 7 March 2009, Mallya wins Gandhi souvenirs, hammers govt claims - The Economic Times (indiatimes.com), accessed on 3 May 2022.
7. The official website of Godda district. www.godda.nic.in, accessed on 3 May 2022.
8. Final EIA and EMP [Environment Impact Assessment and Environment Management Plan] Report, page. 7. http://environmentclearance.nic.in/, accessed on 3 May 2022.
9. Ibid.
10. India’s coal mining ambition hurts indigenous group, Amnesty says | Reuters, accessed on 3 May 2022.
11. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/ governance /land-acquired-forcefully-for-adani-s-godda-power-plant-62014, accessed on 3 May 2022.
12. Scroll.in, Adivasi, Dalit Villagers move Jharkhand High Court against land acquisition for Adani power plant (scroll.in), accessed on 4 May 2022.
13. Ibid.
14. See Oliver Ramsbotham, Tom Woodhouse and Hugh Miall, Contemporary Conflict Resolution, 4" edition, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016) for detailed discussion.
15. Anthony J. Parel, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). P.67.
16. Ibid. p.73.
17. For details, see Alpa Shah, Jens Lerche and Others, Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in the 21* Century India (London: Oxford University Press, 2018).
18. Ibid.
19. Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Area, Report of an Expert Group of the Planning Commission of India, set up in 2006, published by the Government of India in 2008, p. 4.
20. Ibid, p.3
21. Ibid, p.15.
22. Anthony J. Parel, op. cit. p. 38.
23. Interview of Himanshu Kumar published in DNA, 2010. If Gandhi were alive today, he'd be in a jail in Dantewada: Himanshu Kumar (dnaindia.com), accessed on 5 May 2022.
24. Aditya Nigam, “Gandhi-The ‘Angel of History’, Reading Hind Swaraj Today”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 4, No. 11 (March 14-20, 2009), p. 41.
25. Ibid.
26. DNA, 2010 op. cit.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Home - Self Employed Women’s Association (sewa.org), accessed on 10 May 2022.
30. Interview with Katherine Marshall in 2010 after having been awarded with the prestigious Niwano Peace Prize, https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/ ; A Discussion with Ela Bhatt, Founder, Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) (georgetown.edu), accessed on 10 May 2022.
31. J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics (London: University of Minnesota press, 2006), p. 53.
32. Ibid, p. 127.
33. Harijan, 29-04-1946. The voice of people may be said to be God’s voice, the voice of panchayat.
34. Dibyesh Anand, Hindu Nationalism in India and the Politics of Fear (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
35. Ibid.
36. Douglas Allen, The Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi for the Twenty First Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. VII.
37. Anthony J. Parel, op. cit. p. 49.
38. Gandhi chose to write Hind Swaraj in dialogical genre for easier intelligibility.
39. Anthony J. Parel, op. cit. p. 49.
40. CWMG, Vol. 32, p. 102.
41. Anthony J. Parel, op. cit. p. 102
42. Young India, 22-12-1927.
43. Ibid, 16-04-1931, p.78.
44. Young India, 02-03-1922, p.129.
45. Kumar Rahul, On the Self-Other Relationship: Lessons from Gandhi for an Alternative Cosmopolitan Framework, Gandhi Marg, Vol. 37, No. 2 (July-September 2015), p. 333-54.
46. Ibid.
47. Young India, 16-03-1921, p. 81.
48. M. K. Gandhi, India of My Dreams (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1947), p.13.
49. Kumar Rahul, op. cit. p.351.
50. Ibid. p. 349.
51. ‘A phrase used by T. M. Scanlon.
52. Kumar Rahul, op. cit.
53. Anthony J. Parel, op. cit. p.10.
54. Ibid. p. 17.

Gandhi Marg, Volume 44, Issue 1, April-June 2022.

* SANJEEV KUMAR is Associate professor of Political Science, Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. He is also a Senior Fellow at Centre for Ethics, Politics and Global Affairs, Institute of Social Science, New Delhi. Address: DA- 557, Shalimar Bagh, Delhi -10088 Email: sanjeevkumar78@gmail.com

* KUMAR RAHUL is Associate professor of Political Science, Ramjas College, University of Delhi. He is also a Senior Fellow at Centre for Ethics, Politics and Global Affairs, Institute of Social Science, New Delhi. Address: 42/3, Ramjas College Teachers’ Quarter, Chhatra Marg, Maurice Nagar, Delhi-110007; Email: kumarrahul@ramjas.du.ac.in

* RABUL PATGIRI is Associate Professor of Political Science, Gauhati, University, Assam. Address: Department of Political Science, Gauhati University, Jalukbari, Guwahati, Assam-781014. Email:rubuldu@gmail.com