P. V.
Narasimha Rao
Former Prime Minister of India
Gandhi can well be described as truly
the greatest theorist and practitioner of non-violence and tolerance
of our times. He sought to awaken a novel moral consciousness in
humankind. It is, therefore, natural that thinkers of sensitivity
and distinction throughout the world should reflect upon what he
said, and how he acted, in order to gain a fuller understanding of
his discourse and its implications for the future, as the humanity
approaches a new millennium.
The founding Charter of UNESCO places
upon it a profound responsibility in promoting creative interaction
between different cultures and world-views, just as it also placed
upon this Organization the responsibility of bringing the people of
the world together in mutual understanding and in peaceful
coexistence. The Constitution of UNESCO states that “since wars
begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the
defences of peace must be constructed.” This is a sentiment entirely
Gandhian in letter and spirit. Gandhi believed that it is the
violence and conflict in the minds of people that lay at the very
roots of anguish and discord of our times. For this reason, he
argued that once the minds are freed from thoughts of violence and
conflict, not only individuals and communities within nations, but
also nations within the world community, could come together in
creative endeavour.
I am deeply conscious of the fact
that we are meeting today in this beautiful city of Paris, which
occupies a distinctive place in philosophical reflection and in
humanist thought in the contemporary world. I am, therefore,
encouraged to raise some basic questions about the human condition.
When we turn to the fundamental issues of our times – the questions
of war and peace in the nuclear age; the problems of production and
distribution in a post-modern era; and the globalization of economic
and information systems, which have at once combined as well as
segregated a variety of identities – then the need for discourses
that address themselves to these questions and find imaginative
answers to them becomes compelling. I believe that those engaged in
reflection on these issues will profit greatly by examining Gandhian
thought and action. The content and range of the ideas expressed by
the Mahatma, no less than his translation of those ideas into
practice, are indeed remarkable in many ways.
In any exploration of the seminal
ideas generated by Mahatma Gandhi, and the courses of action he
embarked upon, it would be profitable to recall the cultural milieu
in which Gandhi was born, in 1869, and the influences, Indian and
Western, which shaped his mind as he reached adulthood. Gandhi was
born in the state of Gujarat in western India that has, since time
immemorial, looked across the waters of the Arabian Sea to West Asia
and beyond, to the European world. The Gandhi family was a family of
status; the future Mahatma’s father pursued the liberal vocation of
civil service in a small principality.
The third quarter of the nineteenth
century was an era in which India was fully drawn into the imperial
system of Great Britain. It is not surprising that this integration
adversely affected not only her material and economic condition but
also her social and political condition. Yet the colonial situation
can best be understood as a situation of dialectical complexity; the
subversion of the economy and the cultural fabric of India was
accompanied by a certain measure of regeneration, in the spheres of
social production and intellectual reflection.
While the epicenters of political and
economic activity in colonial India, namely, the port cities of
Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, witnessed to the full the impact of
colonial rule, the remote towns of Porbandar and Rajkot in Gujarat-
where the young Gandhi grew up- remained largely indigenous in
content and texture. The cultural impact of the West was even more
marginal. Indeed, the emotional and intellectual consciousness of
young Gandhi, and the notion of sacred and
profane in his being were largely shaped by the saints
of devotional Hinduism. These saints wrote lyrical poetry of deep
compassion and profound spiritual content that linked, for
centuries, the sensibility of successive generations of Gujaratis.
Gandhi’s autobiographical writings reveal the special impact which
one of these saints- Narasingh Mehta- made upon his consciousness. A
composition by this saint, notwithstanding the loss of its literary
flavour in translation, conveys the social and moral concerns
central to that devotional theism. This is what he says:
He is a
Vaishnava who identifies himself with the sorrow of others
And in doing so has no pride about
him
Such a one respects everyone and
speaks ill of none
He labours neither under infatuation
nor delusion
Narasaiyo
says: His presence purifies his surroundings.
These and similar values of
devotional Hinduism were manifest in the Gandhi household through
the intense religiosity of his mother, Putlibai. This created in the
psyche of young Gandhi a sensitivity to matters of the spirit-
indeed, a quality of existential immersion in religious concerns-
which later blossomed into a powerful force behind the adult
Gandhi’s intervention in social, political and economic affairs.
But, the influence of saintly poets like Narasingh Mehta was not the
only influence upon the Gandhi household. The commercial communities
of Western India, in pursuit of eclecticism so characteristic of the
Hindus were also deeply drawn to the metaphysical principles of
Jainism. The Jain way of life rested upon a calculus of austere
rationality, under- pinned by a belief in the non-exclusivity of
truth, or anekantavada. Belief in this principle enabled a
Jain to extend a sympathetic consideration to points of view other
than one’s own. Indeed, the remarkable capacity of Jainism
profoundly influenced Gandhi’s later career as he led various
movements in South Africa and in India.
Gandhi’s journey as a young student
to the great metropolis of London, to pursue studies in law, brought
him into the very heart of world culture. The initial shock
experienced by the young Gujarati in London was formidable. He was,
however, soon at ease in his new surroundings. He combined the study
of law with the exploration of Western culture. This speaks volumes
of his resilience, inner strength, and self-confidence. In England,
the influences of his childhood interacted with the new situation
and enriched his intellectual and philosophical experience. Apart
from the classics of Hindu and Buddhist literature, he also read
some of the seminal Christian texts. Further, the social and
economic consequences of industrialization made tremendous
impression on his sensitive mind; and probably played a vital role
in shaping his attitude towards industrial societies as a whole.
After completing his studies, Gandhiji returned to Gujarat, still
committed to the notion of making his mark in life as a lawyer.
Gandhi had barely returned to India,
when legal business took him to Pretoria in 1893. South Africa, at
that juncture, was a polity where a bigoted white community was
taking the first steps towards the construction of apartheid. The
gross inequalities to which coloured and black residents were
subjected touched Gandhi to the quick, and apart from attending to
legal business, he entered public life in order to combat racial
discrimination.
The racial conflict in South Africa,
in the last decade of the nineteenth century, exercised a profound
influence upon Gandhi. On the one hand, he reached out to public
activity in order to redress the situation. On the other, he set
upon an interior journey of moral exploration that was destined to
make his life a quest for self-realization, as well as an epic
struggle against racial discrimination and political subjugation in
Africa and Asia. Gandhiji later observed of his sojourn in South
Africa:
Here it was that the religious force
within me
became
a living force. I had gone to South Africa… for gaining my own
livelihood. But… I found myself in search of God and striving for
self- realization.
Gandhi’s anguish at the state of
South Africa prompted him to widen his religious and philosophical
education through a critical reading of texts other than those of
Hinduism and Jainism. He also reached out to figures like John
Ruskin, the Christian socialist, and Leo Tolstoy, the Russian
novelist and philosopher, who sought to apply the principles of
Christianity to the day-to-day problems of human existence. From
Ruskin, Gandhi imbibed the value of the dignity of labour – manual
or intellectual; and from Tolstoy he gained an understanding of how
love and compassion could change humanity for the better. Although
Gandhiji delved deep into the religious and philosophical literature
of the West, this exploration largely brought out the original
faiths ingrained in him. As an eminent scholar of classical India,
Professor A.L. Basham has put it, Gandhi’s ideas were:
fully in keeping
with Indian tradition, and were probably developed from notions
which he absorbed in his contact with
the West… His genius was even more successful than that of earlier
reformers in harmonizing non-Indian ideas with the Hindu Dharma, and
giving
them a thoroughly Indian character; and he did this by relating them
to earlier doctrines or concepts.
The instinctive relationship which
Gandhi sought to establish between social and moral action needs to
be spelt out a little because the illuminating light it throws upon
his development as a political actor in South Africa; upon his epic
role, slightly later, in the liberation of India; and upon the
promise which Gandhian discourse holds out for the possible
resolution of the problems which haunt humanity towards the end of
the twentieth century.
Despite assessments to the contrary,
it seems reasonable to hold that the political actor in Gandhi was,
throughout his long career, subordinate to the moral actor. The
Mahatma was ultimately concerned with individual and collective
salvation, rather than with purely mundane matters. The fires that
raged within Gandhi can best be sensed in his own words:
The politician in me has never dominated a single decision of
mine, and if I seem to take part in politics, it is only because
politics encircles us today like the coils of a snake from which one
cannot get out, no matter how much one tries. I wish, therefore, to
wrestle with the snake … Quite selfishly, as I wish to live in peace
in the midst of a bellowing storm howling around me, I have been
experimenting with myself and my friends by introducing religion
into politics. Let me explain what I mean by religion. It is not the
Hindu religion … but the religion… which binds one indissolubly to
the truth within and which ever purifies.
This creative synthesis, flowing from
a fusion of Gandhi’s moral anguish with his social concerns as a
political actor, is reflected eloquently in a novel and
revolutionary mode of political action known to us as
satyagraha, or soul-force, which he first crafted in South
Africa.
The context in which
Satyagraha was developed as a political weapon needs to be
highlighted. In 1906, the Government of Transvaal enacted
legislation which required Indians to register themselves as
residents, thus denying to them their natural rights as citizens of
the British Empire. To protest this ‘Black Act’, Gandhiji organized
a meeting in Johannesburg. The Mahatma had contemplated the adoption
of a resolution encouraging Indians in South Africa to resist
discriminatory legislation. However, what was designed as
conventional protest against an unjust law, acquired a unique
significance when a participant declared, in the name of God, that
he would never submit to that law and advised all present to do
likewise. Protesting is one thing and deciding to resist the law is
quite another. A world of difference exists between the two. People
spontaneously decided, at that meeting, to resist the law. In
focusing upon the heightened moral import of the resolution, Gandhi
pointed out that it had become something of the highest
significance: “Everyone must search his own heart and if the inner
voice assures him that he has the requisite strength to carry him
through, then only should he pledge himself and then only will his
pledge bear fruit”. This thought he repeated several times during
the Indian freedom movement.
Thus was born Satyagraha
as a weapon for fighting untruth and oppression in the world. As
spelt out over time by Gandhi, there were distinct features to the
moral code of the true satyagrahi: he believed that truth
could have more than one facet; he further assumed that the
conscience of his adversary could be touched and transformed through
non-violent protest. Times without number Gandhiji said: “I have no
hatred for the British, I have no hatred for the Englishmen. I have
no hatred for any one. They are all human beings. What I protest
against is the system and what they are doing to the Indian people.”
This is how he differentiated between protest against the system and
hatred against those who were perpetuating that system. Most
important of all, Gandhi believed that no truthful contest ever
yielded a victor and a vanquished; instead, the reconciliation that
followed any Satyagraha brought the former adversaries
together in a firm bond of friendship underpinned by their spiritual
upliftment.
As a youngster I was very much
affected - in fact, influenced – by the anti-British agitation in
India. I can tell you that but for this very restraining influence
of Mahatma Gandhi on our lives, on our actions, we could have become
violent. I cannot imagine what could have happened to my generation
because we were in the thick of the struggle as students, as young
people, and later on as participants in the struggle. Mahatma Gandhi
laid particular emphasis on the right means in order to get
the right ends. This was the influence that many of us had on
us. Those who did not yield to these influences, or did not obey the
Gandhian principles, went their different ways. But that is a
different story.
The potency of
Satyagraha, the novel instrument of political protest devised by
Gandhi, was reflected in the substantial gains that he was able to
secure for the Indian community in South Africa before he left for
India in 1914. General J.C. Smuts, who negotiated a settlement with
Gandhi was, therefore, delighted when he learnt of the Mahatma’s
departure for his homeland. “The saint has left our shores”, Smuts
observed, “I sincerely hope forever.” There was another sequel to
the struggle against racial discrimination which Gandhi had waged in
South Africa earlier in the century. The black community and its
leaders too, remembered the power of non-violence; and despite the
brutal authority characterized by the regime of apartheid, they
ultimately triumphed over it through a non-violent
yet militant struggle. When
President Nelson Mandela visited Delhi
in 1990, he referred to the Gandhian legacy in South Africa and
said, “We have since been influenced by his [that is, Gandhi’s]
perception and tradition of non-violent struggle.”
When Gandhi returned to India in
1914, after an interval of two decades, he noticed enormous changes
in the country’s political scene. By the second decade of the
twentieth century, the middle classes in the subcontinent were fully
drawn into a nationalist stance,
ideologically and
organizationally. Between the upper
middle classes on the one hand, and the relatively less well-off
peasants, artisans and workers, on the other , stood a great gulf of
wealth and consciousness that was difficult to bridge through the
conventional mechanisms of modern politics. The colonial State had
exploited those who laboured in the fields and factories much more
than it had exploited the middle classes. Yet, the nationalism of
the well-to-do was articulate and organized, while the nationalism
of the poor and deprived lacked organization and modern ideology.
Indeed, the poor could only voice their anguish through seemingly
spontaneous and localized upsurges that were suppressed forthwith by
the colonial State. Even in the nineteenth century, there had been
several small and big uprisings in the tribal areas against the
exploitation by British-backed feudals. Some of them continued for
many years, but eventually all of them collapsed under the weight of
superior weapons and deeper intrigues to divide the tribals. So, in
the beginning decades of the twentieth century, the question of
linking the anguish of the deprived classes with the aspirations of
the middle classes in a purposeful and mass-based nationalism
remained mostly unanswered.
When Gandhi addressed himself to
the Indian situation in 1914, he chose as his base the Ashram, or
the spiritual retreat, as an institution ideally suited to the work
he had in view. His dialogue with the middle classes, at that
juncture, confirmed his view that these classes were united in the
desire for liberation from colonial bondage. Within the span of a
few years, he further discovered that the peasants, artisans and
workers, too, saw the overthrow of British rule as an essential
requirement of their material and spiritual welfare. Since it was
difficult to reach these classes through the idiom of modern
politics, liberal or radical, Gandhi took recourse to popular
religious imagery as a potent means to rally the poor to the cause
of nationalism and, at the same time, to heighten the level of their
social consciousness. He deliberately built closer identification
with the poor and down-trodden by adopting their half-naked clothing
and hut-dwelling way of life. This is one of the most remarkable
things about Gandhi. He said if the millions of the country do not
have clothes enough to cover their bodies then he will also wear
only a small dhoti, and not even a shirt. This gesture of his led to
a genuine mingling of hearts and minds and had a lasting effect. In
this process, he discovered an untapped reservoir of popular energy
that he harnessed into agitations, based upon the principles of
Satyagraha.
The initial Gandhian experiments in
Satyagraha in India were on a small scale. They aimed at
resolving the grievances of specific groups of peasants and workers.
They, however, also expanded their political horizons. When World
War I
came to an end, in which the people of India had extended
substantial support to Great Britain, Gandhi embarked upon a
movement of Satyagraha involving India as a whole. Perhaps it
is not so well known that during the first World War it was Gandhiji
himself who advocated full support to the British against the advice
of most of his advisers, followers, and colleagues. They believed
that that was the time when they could ask for full independence
from the British Government and make it a condition for India’s
participation in the war. Gandhiji rejected their plea saying that
the time was not proper to ask “for our pound of flesh.” “Let us
first co-operate, let us first help the British”, he said. But after
the World War came to an end, it was the other side that breached
the promise; as a result, Gandhiji started his Satyagraha
movement. Indeed, in a span of three decades, Gandhi initiated a
number of nation-wide protests with two strategic purposes in view:
first, to knit together the different social, linguistic and
religious communities within India into modern nationhood;
and second, to demonstrate to the
British that their empire over South Asia would have to be
dismantled at the earliest.
I had a good fortune to observe, as a
young boy, these Satyagraha movements. Something out of this
world, something you could not possibly imagine. A new kind of
movement he created in the whole length and breadth of the country
with nothing like the modern gadgets that we have today. All the
means of information were in the hands of the British Government.
Nothing in our hands, nothing in Gandhiji’s hands. Even then, from
Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from one end of the country to the other, it
was the same spirit of nationalism, the spirit of revolt, the spirit
of asking the British to quit India, and the spirit of gaining
independence. It was something of a miracle.
The nation-wide
Satyagraha campaigns waged by Gandhi rank among the biggest
popular mobilizations in the history of humankind. I have touched
upon the moral content of Satyagraha at its moment of birth
in South Africa in 1906. When we relate Satyagraha in South
Africa to Satyagraha in India, it would be appropriate to
evoke the social dimensions of the latter. The population of India,
at that time, was approximately 400 million. Roughly 75 per cent of
this population lived in the villages. This was the constituency
which Gandhi sought to draw into nationalist politics through
satyagrahi action. To say that he fully succeeded in doing so would,
of course, be untrue. However, the flag of nationalism was firmly
planted by Gandhi in every substantial village in India; and in
every village of any size a dozen or more peasant households were
actively drawn into the orbit of the struggle. The demographic scale
of the nationalist movement was breathtaking, since it literally
mobilized 10 per cent of the nation, that is, about 40 million
persons, in non-violent action against the greatest imperial power
of that period. It succeeded splendidly because it was non- violent.
It was very easy for the British Government to put down anything
violent, but they just did not know what to do with this non-violent
movement sweeping village after village throughout the country.
Perhaps the dextrous artistry of
satyagrahi action and the ingenious manner in which symbolic
action, backed by rudimentary organization, drew tens upon millions
across the land into movements of resistance is poignantly captured
by the Dandi March of 1930. The movement was directed against a tax
on salt, which affected adversely even the poorest peasant household
in India. To signify his disapproval of the tax on salt, Gandhi
selected a small band of devoted followers, 79 in all, representing
different sections of Indian society. The Mahatma and his
satyagrahis marched from Ahmedabad, in Western India, to a
village called Dandi, on the Arabian Sea. By traversing 241 miles in
measured marches over a period of a few weeks, Gandhi and his
gallant band of satyagrahis united a nation of 400 million
against the British Empire. As they went along, the crowds swelled
and swelled and it became absolutely unmanageable when they reached
Dandi.
The incredible economy of
Gandhian action, the inverse relationship between the scale of
Satyagraha and the demographic momentum of popular arousal,
illustrate the tactical genius of the Mahatma. Indeed, the
cost-effectiveness of the “Short March”-as I would like to describe
the trek from Ahmedabad to Dandi in the modern parlance-
demonstrates the superiority of satyagrahi action over
conventional modes of political protest, constitutional or violent.
And the crowing feature of that
action was, of course, that it was
unarmed and non-violent, and, therefore, repression and
suppression-proof.
Despite the massive and countrywide
dimensions of the movement, its absolute discipline and restraint
were remarkable. Gandhi believed firmly in the purity of the means
and in the immutable correspondence between ends and means. He
suspended a countrywide Satyagraha movement abruptly on a
single incident of violence committed by the people at a place
called Chowri Chowra in the State of Uttar Pradesh. So widespread
was the disappointment and so deep and genuine resentment on this
suspension that even Jawaharlal Nehru expressed his serious
reservation on the Mahatma’s decision. But Gandhi struck to his guns
and asserted that the means adopted in any Satyagraha
movement must invariably be non-violent. The movement was suspended
but the message registered indelibly in the minds of the people.
The triumph of non-violent protest
over racial discrimination in South Africa, or colonial domination
in South Asia, does not exhaust the creative potential of
Satyagraha as an instrument of revolutionary action and social
transformation. Indeed, in its depth and comprehensiveness, Gandhian
thought and action reach out to life in all its rich diversity: to
questions of social production and the distribution of wealth; to
the nexus between the state, civil society, and the citizen; to the
manner in which the basic unit of society, namely the family,
relates to the individual, on the one hand, and to the social order,
on the other; and last, but not the least, to the character of the
sacred and the profane as a guide to human beings in their journey
across life to the worlds that lie beyond. The sheer range of
Gandhian thought and practice, therefore, makes it one of the
richest sources of reflection and guide to action today, across the
decades that separate us from the vibrant and living truth of the
Mahatma. Its only limitations are those inherent in the society and
the state. But who, except God, is immune to limitations?
Any inquiry into the contemporary
relevance of satyagrahi thought and practice should locate
itself in Gandhiji’s understanding of non-violence, no less than in
his understanding of social power as the basis of political action.
The Mahatma repeatedly observed that non-violence, in his view, was
the weapon of the strong rather than of the weak; just as it was
also a weapon that drew victor and vanquished into a common
association of reconciliation and moral regeneration. Gandhi’s
concept of power was of a piece with his understanding of
non-violence. Not surprisingly, he looked askance at the power which
grew out of the barrel of the gun, or rested upon the ephemeral
calculus of wealth. For the Mahatma, the most legitimate form of
power came through welding together popular aspirations and the life
of truth into a movement of social transformation and moral
upliftment. The struggles which he set in motion in South Africa,
and later in India, were excellent examples of the aggregation of
non-violent power and its use in the social and political domain for
the good of the people.
What are the likely, possible,
and desirable arenas of satyagrahi action in our times? Since
we are located in an age, when the complete annihilation of human
civilization through weapons of mass destruction continues to be a
possibility, it is relevant to ask whether the Mahatma’s concept of
conflict resolution has any role to play in relations between
sovereign nations as well as those between different sections within
the nation. At the risk of touching upon a theme that may appear
parochial yet has a world-wide potential that needs to be explored,
I would contend that the Gandhian sense of power profoundly
influenced the foreign policy of India after
Independence in 1947. This policy, as
is well known, sought to bring together the newly liberated nations
of Asia, Africa, and Latin America-
with their common memory of domination-
on a common platform to confer self-confidence upon polities that
lacked the sinews of conventional strength in the post-World War-II
era.
As classically formulated,
Non-Alignment probably assumes a different significance from the one
it had in the third quarter of our century. But as a principle of
equity and sanity, which enabled the developing nations to speak
with a voice of dignity in the fora of the world, Non- Alignment is
as relevant today as it was when it was enunciated. Although the
Non-Aligned Movement took shape in 1962, the concept predated Indian
independence. The principle was clearly enunciated in a resolution
of the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress in 1946.
Yet in relating Gandhian principles to the conduct of world affairs,
I want to go beyond Non-Alignment, to touch upon the vital issue of
nuclear disarmament in our times. Indeed, our deep commitment to
Gandhian values, as a nation which looks up to the Mahatma as its
most eminent citizen in the twentieth century, is eloquently
reflected in the proposal which India initiated in 1988, for a
phased and universal programme of nuclear disarmament. Rajiv Gandhi
articulated this vision to rid the world of nuclear weapons at the
Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on
Disarmament. As heirs to Mahatma Gandhi, we look upon our proposal
for universal nuclear disarmament as Gandhian in spirit, just as we
look upon it as a measure that can make the world a safer place for
generations yet to come. Since UNESCO is dedicated to the promotion
of world peace, I take this opportunity to reiterate the outline of
this essentially Gandhian proposal for universal nuclear
disarmament. I commend this proposal before the men and women of
scholarship assembled here in the conviction that they will so
influence world opinion that the dream of universal nuclear
disarmament will become a reality within a finite, stipulated time.
The question of nuclear disarmament
is only one of the issues on the agenda of
satyagrahi action in our times. No less significant are issues
relating to the generation of wealth between, and within, nations in
the world community; or questions pertaining to the articulation of
local and regional identities within existing polities; and finally,
to the vulnerability of the Nation-State itself, in the face of
emerging supranational regional organizations and changing
technological and information systems. I shall touch upon these
problems separately, with a view to locating them within the
Gandhian discourse.I shall also try to draw from the Gandhian
discourse, possible lines of solution to these problems.
Perhaps it would be appropriate
to dwell upon the question of wealth generation and its
distribution, in the first instance. There is a widespread yet
erroneous belief, within India as well as outside India, that Gandhi
lacked a full understanding of industrial societies; and that he may
have been dismissive about the increasing pace and impact of
industrialization in the twentieth century. Nothing could be farther
from the truth. As a student of law in London, Gandhi explored
industrialization in Great Britain intensively and set out his
understanding of this phenomenon in a work called Hind Swaraj.
The Mahatma’s quarrel was not with industrialization as such but
with situations that reduced human beings to helpless instruments of
technology in the name of development. The dehumanization was
anathema to Gandhi,
whether it emanated in the Capitalist
system or the Communist system. I still remember how Gandhi was
condemned in both camps, whatever may be the encomiums he is earning
after he died. His trusteeship principle, namely that those who
possess wealth must do so as trustees of the poor, was equally
inconvenient to both camps and sounded very odd at the time, as it
does even today prima facie. Yet I wish thinkers of today to
go into this principle deeply. I have every hope that economic
relations eventually will need to be redefined on the basis of a new
meaning to be
attached to
the concepts of
ownership and possession. What is ownership? Who owns the air, the
oceans, the land? There is a saying in India that all land belongs
to God. When did ownership of land start in India? Only after the
British introduced what is called the “Permanent Settlement”
according to which a piece of land belongs to a person if his/her
name is written in a particular register in a particular office. Why
should it be so? It is so, because the British wanted it to be so.
This is how it is. We remember the time when the ownership of land
was not so rigid as to be proved in a court of law. People just
lived on the land; it was communally owned. People believed that
land belongs to God and, therefore, available to everyone in the
village. In those days, the population was not as big as now and the
entire legal proprietary system of land, as conceived by the British
government had not been transplanted. It is true that the emperors
in India had the system of revenue collection, but it was not as
rigid as we have later made it. The assertion that all land belongs
to God is fully ingrained in Indian thought since time immemorial
and Gandhiji’s principle derives from it.
These concerns were wedded to two additional concerns which had not
been expressed by any of Gandhi’s contemporaries, though they are
forcefully articulated among the green
activists today. Where is Gandhi and where is the green movement? It
is at least separated by 50 years, if not more. These concerns are
baneful consequences of mindless consumerism, on the one hand; and
the need for eco-friendly development, on the other. In his writings
on social and economic questions, which are exploratory rather than
definitive, Gandhi anticipates the notion of sustainable development
at the same time as he expresses the need for devising systems of
social production and environmental protection that are supportive
rather than antagonistic towards each other. The views of the
Mahatma on such issues, which are sustained by an acute sense of the
practical and the desirable, constitute a rich source of insights
about economic growth in developing and developed societies. He
asserted, crisply, that in God’s creation, there is enough for man’s
need but not for man’s greed.
Gandhi’s plea for sustainable development did not exhaust his
concern for the processes of growth in modern society. Indeed, if
only tangentially, he was deeply concerned with market and command
systems as engines of increasing production in the modern world.
That the market, if left to its own devices, becomes an obstruction
rather than a stimulus to production, is one of the central
arguments in Hind Swaraj, to which I
have referred earlier. Yet the Mahatma was equally aware that
command systems of social production, too, can throw up their own
distinct pathologies.
Since the genesis of Indian culture in classical antiquity, there
exists in our collective consciousness a deeply lodged belief that
in the social, no less than in the metaphysical, domain the ‘middle
path’ is the most desirable of all paths. This notion was initially
articulated by Gautam Buddha in the sixth century BC at the first
flowering of our civilization. Men of politics, no less than men of
religion, were deeply influenced by this notion over the centuries.
In the years since 1947, the notion of the ‘middle path’ was one of
the central principles behind official policies of economic growth.
Very recently, the notion of the ‘middle path’ has been reiterated
in respect of initiatives connected with economic growth. What
sustains this remarkable continuity is probably the epic scale of
Indian society and the culturally plural cluster of communities
which constitute its social body.
The notion of the middle path as a sensible means to economic
growth is powerful endorsed in the writings of the Mahatma on social
and economic questions, through these writings are tentative and
exploratory. And its legitimacy goes even deeper in the Indian past.
Here is a fertile field for intellectual inquiry by those engaged in
reflection on economic issues, no less than for those engaged in
social action, in different parts of the world.
Last but not the least, I would like to speak of the great
political disquiet of our times, as it stems from the crisis of
identities, particularly local and regional identities, within the
systems of nation states. Gandhi was very alive to the issues of
Indian society, partly because of the plural character of the Indian
society, and partly also because the creation of modern nationhood
in India- in place of an older civilizational bond- meant the
generation of an entirely novel overarching identity. The
satyagrahi in Mahatma Gandhi handled this task with a
sensitivity and skill rare in the history of social and political
movements in our times.
What were the factors behind Gandhi’s conspicuous success in
mobilizing different social groups in support of the struggle for
nationhood in India? Further, to what extent are these factors
relevant to the handling of issues of local and regional identities
within nations in the world today? There can be no easy answers to
these questions, since the problem is one of tremendous complexity.
However, the manner in which Gandhi conceptualized the role of the
citizen in the modern State and the manner also in which he actually
drew the citizen into social and political activity, provides clues
to the reasons behind his success. At the very outset, he did not
look upon the individual and society as being in the political
domain. Instead, he sought to reach out to the individual-in-society
as the basis of social action: as he relied upon his spoken words as
a political actor of high moral integrity, they rippled across the
fabric of society, to provide the basis of social unity on a truly
monumental scale.
In the very nature of things, whether it was in South Africa in
1906, or subcontinental India in 1930, mass action could only be
concerted through satyagrahi action and through the voluntary
association of individuals whose hearts and minds had been touched
and transformed in great movements of collective endeavour. Gandhi
believed in action and asserted that one ounce of action was better
than a ton of barren ideas. Of course, by action he meant the action
of a satyagrahi.
There are, of course, no blueprints that can provide an infallible
design for individual action or for organized protest by entire
communities. However, we have in Gandhian discourse the sensitivity
to understand the anguish of wronged individuals or communities;
just as we also have in Gandhian discourse the compassionate
statecraft which through moral mediation can help resolve some of
the problems that affect the contemporary world.
How then, can we sum up the thought and practice of Mahatma Gandhi,
a truly epochal figure, whose capacity or social intervention and
moral praxis is reflected as much in the diverse arenas where he
acted in his lifetime as it is reflected in the relevance of his
discourse to the resolution of a wide spectrum of problems long
after his martyrdom in 1948? That Gandhi was a remarkable individual
who developed, existentially rather than systematically, a moral
code and a novel calculus of social protest is readily conceded by
those engaged in reflection no less than those engaged in action in
our times. Indeed, the Mahatma has made a distinctive innovation of
morally oriented political action in the twentieth century.
No less momentous is the fact that more than four decades after his
death, the ideas which Mahatma Gandhi placed before India and the
world are being acknowledged as capable of finding solutions to some
of the most pressing issues faced by humankind. Gandhi’s relevance
is being rediscovered as we move towards a new era in which wealth
generation, political organization, social ordering and spiritual
creativity are undergoing a revolutionary transformation. Seen from
that perspective, Gandhi stands out as one of the towering figures
of our century. Indeed, if the stature of men and women is to be
measured by the fact that their ideas attain increasing validity and
momentum as time passes farther and farther beyond their lives,
Gandhi stands in lonely eminence in the twentieth century. Perhaps
generations to come will turn to him increasingly as they wrestle
with the problems of existence in an era which holds out a potential
of unprecedented moral and material creativity through individual
and collective human endeavour.
All the worldly
possessions left by Gandhi, “the Great Soul in beggar’s garb”, as
the poet Tagore once called him: dinner bowls, wooden fork and
spoon, three porcelain monkeys, his diary, prayer-book, watch,
spittoon, paper knives and two pairs of sandals. They are kept in
the house in New Delhi in the garden of which Gandhi met his death.
Source: Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Lecture, 1995 |