Truth, God and Justice: Walking and Meditating with Gandhi

- By Ananta Kumar Giri*

Truth is God is an enriching collection of writings of Mahatma Gandhi.¹ It contains pearls of Gandhi's thoughts on many aspects of our life related to faith, God, Truth, justice, Ahimsa, etc. It shows us the deep spiritual journey of Gandhi as it is related to ethics, morality, and politics.

To begin with, Gandhi invites us to realize Truth as God, which is not the same thing as God as Truth. Gandhi begins with God is Truth and then realizes Truth as God. Truth touches the reality and faith in God but is not confined to it. Truth has a demanding quality; it calls upon us to realize Truth in our personal, interpersonal, social, worldly, and cosmic lives. Realizing Truth calls for us to realize nonviolence and Ahimsa in our daily lives as well as in our interlinked wider ways of self and social institutions. For Gandhi, ‘[..] without Ahimsa it is not possible to seek and find Truth”.² Gandhi tells us that “One can realize Truth and Ahimsa only by ceaseless striving...”³ Gandhi continues: “The path of Truth is as narrow as it is straight. Even so, is that of Ahimsa. It is like balancing oneself on the edge of a sword. By concentration, an acrobat can walk on a rope. But the concentration required to tread the path of Truth and Ahimsa is far greater”.⁴ But in this difficult journey, prayer, faith in God, and each other help us.

For Gandhi, Ahimsa and Truth are related. Ahimsa is the means, Truth is the end. For Gandhi, “Means to be means must always be within our reach, and so Ahimsa is our supreme duty. If we take care of the means, we are bound to reach the end sooner or later. When ‘once we have grasped this point, final victory is beyond question. Whatever difficulties we encounter, whatever apparent reverses we sustain, we may not give up the quest for Truth which alone is, being God Himself”.⁵

Realizing Truth as God calls us to lead a life of justice. Gandhi writes: “Nothing can be grander than to ask God to make us act justly towards everything that lives”.⁶ Acting justly towards everything that lives is a call to us: to act justly to all irrespective of all known distinctions. For example, acting justly not only to self but also to the other, not only to members of our own family but to the human family and to both animate and inanimate objects in the Universe. Our prevalent theories of justice such as that of John Rawls, the influential theorist of justice of our times whose classic A Theory of Justice is being celebrated this year on its 50" anniversary, is limited to a nation-state. But Gandhi's journey with Truth, God, and justice is not confined to nation-state such as citizens of a nation-state. Gandhi urges us to act justly to all whether or not they are members of our nation-state, our village or tribes. Acting justly here becomes part of global justice, as Amartya Sen argues. For Sen, in realizing global justice, we need to go beyond Rawlsian conception of “international justice” as “laws among peoples” as realization of global justice involves “person-to-person relations” not only “inter-societal relations”.⁷ As Sen challenges us: “[..] justice across borders must not be seen merely as “international justice’ [..] A feminist activist in America who wants to help, say remedy some features of female disadvantage in Africa or Asia, draws on a sense of identity that goes well beyond the sympathies of one nation for the predicament of another”.⁸

Justice here also becomes part of transnational justice as “non-domination” which overcomes national barriers, as suggested by Rainer Forst, a key thinker in this field.⁹ Justice and transnational justice as non-domination calls us to overcome domination over humans, nations, and nature. Non-domination here can be related to Gandhian vision and practice of Swaraj or self-rule not only as recipient but as a maker of rules. Here Forst building upon both Marx and Kant, which resonates with the spirit of Gandhi, tells us:

The dignity of a free person can never be understood merely in terms of the ‘enjoyment’ of freedom or of certain liberties; it is always also a matter of the freedom of giving laws to oneself, the freedom of normative self-determination. This is a kind of freedom that comes in two modes—one moral and one political—but its modus operandi is the same, despite the difference between these two modes. The laws that constitute this practice and laws that are generated through it do not only protect freedom—they also express freedom.¹⁰
Furthermore,
[..] Justice articulates the fundamental claim not to be determined but instead to be an agent and equal authority of justification that no one should be subjected to norms and social relations that cannot be justified in appropriate terms towards him or her.¹¹

Gandhi also invites us to act justly not only towards human beings but also to all beings such as plants and animals. This helps us overcome human-centeredness and arrogance and realize ourselves as part of Nature and our vast cosmos, which includes both human beings and other beings, animate and inanimate. It helps us realize justice with meeting of species going beyond the species dominance of human beings as Dona Haraway¹², a deep thinker of our times tells us. For Martha Nussbaum¹³, another thinker of justice, it urges us to realize justice as “cross-species dignity.”

Justice includes both social justice and justice with Nature. In our times, the latter confronts us squarely as climate justice. The UN’s recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released on August 9, 2021 tells us that our planet is the hottest in the last 125,000 years. This gives rise to temperature rise and many natural calamities such as floods, forest fire, and extreme weather, leading to displacement and creating climate refugees. Climate change is caused by mindless industrialization and consumerism, especially fossil energy consumption, and the people of affluent countries have a major role in this. But the victims of climate collapse who usually come from resource-less countries are not responsible for this. Here how do we act justly? In another talisman, Gandhi urges us to always look up to the poorest of the poor while making our decisions. In the context of current climate change, we need to look at the face of the poorest of the poor and act justly towards our brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, and children who are victims of our actions and decisions. In our current condition, Anthropocene, where human impact on Earth impacts upon the geology of the Earth, there is an epochal need to move from human dominance to living justly with all beings in Nature and our planet. Here, as Dipesh Chakraborty¹⁴ tells us in his recent important work, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Gandhi is an exemplar. Gandhi shows us an example of how to live justly with all beings. Gandhi also shows how we can walk lightly with Light with our Mother Earth becoming her worthy children and custodians. In his Carbon Yoga, Sailesh Rao invites us to understand the distinction between caterpillars and the butterflies, the former swallowing up everything into themselves, while the latter coming out of the caterpillars and spreading pollination of new possibilities from one flower to the other. Our climate collapse is being caused by the caterpillars, the caterpillar dimension of ourselves, and here Gandhi helps us to realize and awaken the butterfly dimensions of our self and society and be butterflies"15

Justice is not just a political act. It is an act and imagination of love. Deep thinkers of our times, such as Paul Ricouer¹⁶ and Fred Dallmayr¹⁷ urge us to realize the integral link between love and justice, which resonates with Gandhi's spirit. Dallmayr is a creative savant of humanity who has deeply walked and meditated with Gandhi, including Gandhi’s Truth where Truth calls us upon us to embody love, justice, and truthfulness in our lives, society, and the world. With Gandhi, we act justly with our actions and intentions of love. Love is part of nonviolence and Ahimsa. We need to embody love and Ahimsa to act justly to all beings. We need to embody nonviolence and Ahimsa in our myriad relations—personal, interpersonal, and institutional. We also need to practice non-injury or Ahimsa in our thinking. Just outward nonviolence is not enough if it is not accompanied by inner Ahimsa and non-injury in our modes of thinking to self, other, and the world.18 Gandhi helps us in both relational Ahimsa, inner Ahimsa, cognitive Ahimsa, epistemic Ahimsa, and ontological Ahimsa. Violence is not only part of our thinking but also our modes of knowing and being what is called epistemology and ontology. Much of modernist ways of knowing and being are saturated with violence, such as modernist science with its violent methods of vivisection and modernist ontology, which is tinged with an ontology of mastery and domination over others, including Nature. Gandhi here helps to realize Ahimsa in our epistemology and ontology, which resonates with new non-violent ways of knowing and being as cultivated by contemporary seekers such as R. Sundara Rajan¹⁹ who tells us not only to “know of” but to “know with,” Giani Vattimo²⁰ who urges to practice “weak ontology,” not only “strong ontology,” and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni²¹ who urges us to practice onto-decolonial turn in our thinking and practice. Gandhi encourages us to challenge and transform still entrenched colonial violence in our epistemology, ontology, and apparatus of justice.

Gandhi has a participatory view on realization of God. God or Divine is not just out there or inside; we think of and relate to God in order to be Godlike and Divine. Therefore Gandhi tells us, “The meaning of divinity is that I want to invoke that Divinity within me.” And Ahimsa is a way of being Divine as Gandhi tells us: “We become God like to the extent we realize nonviolence [..]”²². In the same spirit, we can also realize that we become God like to the extent that we become just, we are just. Being just means to share and not be bound by possession.²³ Ahimsa calls for non-possession or aparigraha and renunciation as renunciation calls for Ahimsa. Gandhi tells us: “[..] perfect renunciation is impossible without perfect observation of Ahimsa in every shape and in every form”.²⁴

And for realizing Ahimsa, we need to realize God within and around. For Gandhi, “Nonviolence is an active force of the highest order. It is soul-force or the power of Godhead within us”.²⁵ Nonviolence calls for ceaseless striving. Gandhi here likens nonviolence to “radium in its action”²⁶, “An infinitesimal quantity of it embedded in a malignant growth, acts continuously, silently and ceaselessly till it has transformed the whole mass of the diseased tissue into a healthy one. Similarly, even little of true nonviolence acts in a silent, subtle, unseen way and leavens the whole of society”.²⁷ Similarly, we can also realize that even a little true step of justice acts silently and sometimes demonstrable way and leavens the whole of self and society.

And this calls for courage, persistence as well as humility. Realization of Truth, Ahimsa, justice, and God calls for humility and humility then becomes the mother of courage and gentle indomitable spirit and strength. For Gandhi, “He wants to practice Truth knows how hard it is. The world may applaud his so-called triumphs. Little does the world know his falls. A truthful man is a chastened being. He needs to be humble. A man who wants to love the whole world, including one who calls himself his enemy, knows how impossible it is to do so in his own strength. He must be as mere dust before he can understand the elements of Ahimsa. He is nothing if he does not daily grow in humility as he grows in love [..].²⁸ Similarly, in our striving for justice, we realize how impossible it is to be just, as philosopher Jacques Derrida, among others, urges us to realize. But our impossibility is not our fate. We overcome this by taking steps towards justice, humble and steadfastness, which then become sources of new awakening, strength, and transformations. In taking this step in sharing and our shared transformations, we can read the following lines of Paul Ricoeur along with the living works and lives of Gandhi and fellow travelers and fighters for Truth, God, and Justice:

The question is worth asking: what is it that makes society more than a system of distribution? Or better: What is it that makes distribution a means of cooperation? Here is where a more substantial element than pure procedural justice has to be taken into account, namely, something like a common good, consisting in shared values. We are then dealing with a communitarian dimension underlying the purely procedural dimension of the social structure. Perhaps we may even find in the metaphor of sharing the two aspects I am here trying to coordinate in terms of each other. In sharing there are shares, that is, these things that separate us. My share is not yours. But sharing is also what makes us share, that is, in the strong sense of the term, share in [..]
I conclude then that the act of judging has as its horizon a fragile equilibrium of these two elements of sharing: that which separates my share or part from yours and that which, on the other hand, means that each of us shares in, takes part in society.²⁹

Notes and References:

1. MK. Gandhi, Truth is God: Gleanings from the writings of Mahatma Gandhi bearing on God, God-Realization and the Godly way, (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1955).
2. Ibid, p. 35.
3. Ibid, p. 34
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid, p. 35.
6. Ibid, p. 48.
7. Amartya Sen, Justice across Borders, In De Greiff P, Cronin C (eds) Global justice and transnational politics: essays on the moral and political challenges of globalization, (London: The MIT Press, 2002), p. 48.
8. Ibid, pp. 48-49.
9. Rainer Forst, Normativity and Power: Analyzing Social Orders of Justification, Tr. Cianan Cronin, ( Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2017).
10. Ibid, pp.157-158.
11. Ibid, p. 130.
12. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet, (Durham, NC: Duke U. Press, 2008).
13. Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
14. Dipesh Chakraborty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
15. Sailesh Rao, Carbon Dharma: The Occupation of Butterflies, (United States: Climate Healers Publications, 2011); Sailesh Rao, Carbon Yoga: The Vegan Metamorphosis, (United States: Climate Healers Publications, 2016).
16. Paul Ricouer, Just, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
17. Fred Dallmayr Gandhi’s Truth Visited, In idem, Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).
18. J.N. Mohanty, Self and Other: Philosophical Essays, (Delhi: Oxford U. Press, 2000)
19. R. Sundara Rajan, Beyond the Crises of European Sciences: Towards New Beginnings, (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1998)
20. Giani Vattimo, Belief, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
21. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization, (London: Routledge, 2018).
22. MK. Gandhi, 1955, op.cit.
23. Paul Ricouer, 2000, op.cit.
24. MK. Gandhi, 1955, op.cit., p. 97.
25. Ibid, p. 35.
26. Ibid, p. 36.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Paul Ricouer, 2000, op.cit., p. 132

Courtesy: Gandhi Marg, Volume 43, Number 4, January-March 2022.

* Ananta Kumar Giri, is Professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies, 79, II Main Road, Gandhinagar, Adyar, Chennai 600020. | Email: aumkrishna@gmail.com