Its generally foolhardy to write about Gandhi, not only because you are never certain you’ve got him right, but because you are almost sure to have him wrong. I don’t mean simply that he was a man of integrity in the sense that he tried to make his actions live up to his ideals, though perhaps in fact he tried more than most to do so. The popular interest in him has been keen to find a man of great spirituality and uniqueness and, on the other, the social scientist’s and historian’s interest in him has sought out a nationalist leader with a strikingly effective method of non-violent political action. It has been common for some decades now to swing from a sentimental perception of him as a “Mahatma” to a cooler assessment of Gandhi as “the shrewd politician”. Non-violence was central in his nationalist mobilization against British rule in India. But the concept is also situated in an essentially religious temperament as well as in a through-going critique of ideas and ideologies of the Enlightenment and of an intellectual paradigm of perhaps a century earlier than the Enlightenment. The strategy of non-violent resistance was first introduced by him so as to bring into the nationalist efforts against the British, an element beyond making only constitutional demands. On the face of it, for those reared on western political ideas, this seemed very odd. Constitutional demands, as they are understood in liberal political theory, are the essence of non-violent politics; as is well known the great early propounders of liberal democratic thought conceived and still conceive of constitutions and their constraints on human public action as a constraint against tendencies toward violence in the form of coercion of individuals by states and other collectivities, not to mention by other individuals. So why did Gandhi, the prophet of non-violence, think that the Indian people, in their demands for greater self-determination, needed more than constitutional demands? And why did he think that this is best called “non-violent” action? The obvious answer is the instrumental and strategic one: he knew that making demands for constitutional change had not been particularly effective or swift in the first two decades of this century, and that since the conventionally conceived alternative was violent revolutionary action –which found advocates on the fringes of nationalist sentiment in India– he instead introduced his own strategy of civil disobedience, at once a non-violent and yet a non- or extra constitutional strategy. But, of course, he had more in mind than this obvious motive. Non-violence was central in his nationalist mobilization against British rule in India. First, Gandhi wanted all of India to be involved in the movement, in particular the vast mass of its peasant population. He did not want the nationalist achievement to be the effort of a group of elite, legally and constitutionally trained, upper-middle class Indian men, who argued in assemblies and roundtable conferences. Non-violent action was the central idea of this vast
mobilization. Second, he knew that violent revolutionary action could not possibly carry the mass of people with it. Revolutionary action was mostly conceived hugger-mugger in underground cells and took the form of isolated subversive terrorist action against key
focal points of government power and interest, it was not conceived as a mass movement. Gandhi chose his version of non-violent civil disobedience instead of the constitutional
demands of the Congress leadership because he thought that the Indian people should not merely ask the British to leave their soil. It was important that they should do so by means that were not
dependent and derivative of ideas and institutions that the British had imposed on them. otherwise, even if the British left, the Indian populations would remain a subject people. “Non-violence or ahimsa and satyagraha to Gandhi personally constituted a deeply felt and worked-out philosophy owing something to Emerson, Thoreau and Tolstoy but also revealing considerable originality. The search for truth was the goal of human life, and as no one could ever be sure of having attained the truth, use of violence to enforce one’s own view of it was sinful.” “Ahimsa is not the crude thing it has been made to appear. Not to hurt any living thing is no doubt part of ahimsa. But it is its least expression. It is hurt by hatred of any kind, by wishing ill of
anybody, by making negative criticisms of others.”) Despite the modesty, one could, of course, resist those with whom one disagrees, and Gandhi made an art out of refusal and resistance
and disobedience. But resistance is not the same as criticism. It can be done with a ‘pure heart’. Criticism reflects an impurity of heart, and is easily corrupted to breed hostility and, eventually,
violence. With an impure heart you could still indulge in nonviolent political activism, but that activism would be strategic, merely a means to a political end. In the long run it would, just as
surely as violence, land you in a midden. Even the following sensible sounding argument for his own conclusion, often given by many of his political colleagues who found his moral attitudes
obscure, did not satisfy Gandhi. Our moral judgements or values are the basis of our moral choices and actions. Unlike judgements of taste that are the basis, say, for choosing a flavour of ice cream, moral judgements have a certain feature which is often called ‘universalizability’. To
chose an action on moral grounds under certain circumstances is to generate a principle which we think applies as an ‘ought’ or an imperative to all others faced with relevantly similar circumstances. Take the wrong view of moral value and judgement, and you will inevitably encourage violence in society. There is no other way to understand his insistence that the satyagrahi has not eschewed violence until he has removed criticism from his lips and heart and
mind. Gandhi was avowedly a humanist, and repeatedly said things reminiscent of humanist slogans along the order of ‘Nothing human is alien to me’. “When one chooses for oneself, one sets an example to everyone.” That is the role of the satyagrahi. To lead exemplary lives, to set examples to everyone by their actions. Gandhi is not a cognitive notion at all. It is an experiential notion. It is not propositions purporting to describe the world of which truth is predicated, it is only our own moral experience which is capable of being true. The liar often values truth and often values it greatly, and precisely because he does so, he wants to conceal it or invent it. The liar indeed has a moral failing in that he disvalues truth-telling, but he still values truth, and what he values in doing so therefore cannot be a moral value.
