Political Gandhi or the Whole Gandhi?

By Tom Weber

TFF Associate, January 28, 2004

Swaraj - not only political self-rule. Satyagraha - one of three gifts

Gandhi's talk of swaraj, that is independence or freedom, is generally interpreted merely as independence for the Indian nation from British rule. However, for Gandhi political activism had a more elemental role. It was to a large degree educative, helping to train the soul and develop character so as to aid the quest for individual perfection. Swaraj means self-rule and to limit this to political self-rule is to largely miss the point.

The Kingdom of God and the Constructive Program: Gandhi's second gift

Gandhi held before himself, and attempted to place before the masses, a picture of an ideal society that was to be the goal of collective endeavour, as the approach towards Truth was to be the goal for the individual. This vision was summed up in the word "Ramrajya", the "Kingdom of God," where there were equal rights for prices and paupers, where even the lowliest person could get swift justice without elaborate and costly procedures, where inequalities that allowed some to roll in riches while the masses did not have enough to eat were abolished, and where sovereignty of the people was based on pure moral authority rather than coercive power.

Gandhi's third gift: the eleven vows

Desai points out that there was a third gift from Gandhi: his eleven vows, a set of rules which established the code of conduct for his ashram inmates and which are key to understanding Gandhi's religious quest.

Gandhi became relatively one-dimensional, a political actor who, stripped of his more confusing trimmings, became palatable for American audience, Gandhi's moral jiu-jitsu having been replaced by a political one where, instead of the moral balance being shifted, the political power of the opponent was undermined. Gandhi's method of political struggle is often referred to in writings on the lives of the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kui and others, however Gandhi has also made a substantial contribution, not commonly commented upon, in areas that are outside the narrowly defined political arena. He also had a large influence on important branches of the disciplines of ecology, peace research and economics through his profound influence on leading figures in the disciplines, such as Arne Naess, Johan Galtung and E.F.Schumacher.

For example, where there is any awareness of them at all, cow protection and khadi (hand-spun, hand-woven cloth) production may have seemed even more anachronistic and irrelevant (and indeed bizarre) to western audiences than they did to some of Gandhi's English educated political co-workers. Ironically these very practices, or at least the philosophy behind them, were examined rather than discarded out of hand by some and even touched profound chords in western thinkers such as Næss and Schumacher, and went into the formulation of what is now known as "deep ecology" and appropriate technology and human-centred "small is beautiful" economics. Even if we just look at Gandhi the political activist or Gandhi the saint we still see someone with great power to influence others. While George Orwell thought that Gandhi's basic aims were reactionary and that his political methods could not have worked against extremely repressive regimes, he still managed to conclude that, "regarded simply as a politician, and compared with other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!"

If, however, we look at the whole Gandhi, instead of just Gandhi the clean smelling politician or beyond reproach saint, we see a person struggling very publicly to discern the meaning of life, someone who not only knew that there was something more to human existence than the mundane, but had the courage to reach out for it and admit to failure. Perhaps the importance of Gandhi is best characterised by Louis Fischer when he perceptively remarked that it "lay in doing what everyone could do but doesn't", and George Woodcock when he noted that the Mahatma, "with an extraordinary persistence ... made and kept himself one of the few free men or our time", rather than by merely pointing out that he helped to disband the greatest empire ever known and was instrumental in freeing a large section of humanity from colonialism. The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research expresses a vision and is an experiment in applied peace research and global networking.