Arundhati Roy on Gandhi - 12b

 Oscar Wilde said, “Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.” Attempts have always been made to consign Gandhi to the dustbin of history. While everybody likes the idea of nonviolence, few believe it can be an effective policy in statecraft today. I read that the department of education in Odisha published a booklet reportedly stating that “Gandhi died because of an accidental sequence of events.” Apparently in a school in Gujarat 15-year-old children were asked how “Gandhi committed suicide” as part of an exam. 

Every so often someone comes along purporting to unmask the “real” Gandhi, the Gandhi that “no one knows,” the Gandhi who was patriarchal, bourgeois, casteist, a sexual puritan, contemptuous of Africans, an enemy of progress and development, even a “friend of Hitler’. (Gandhi authored two short letters to Hitler, urging him to renounce violence, neither of which the war-time British censors permitted to reach the intended recipient.) Yet Gandhi refuses to disappear. He is everywhere, a spectral presence who is likely to haunt even more. 

Few of Gandhi’s ideals survive today in India, and thus we cannot but declare him a failure. But he tried, he believed, and he lived by what he preached (by and large). This makes him a success, for, as the Gita says, you should do your duty without seeking a reward. Indian movie directors keep alive the ghost of Gandhi. (I know of Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi films.) When some unethical act takes place - politicians planning a riot, prisoner beaten by policemen, officials accepting bribes etc., there will be a  photo of Gandhi hanging on the wall behind. 

In The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi, Makarand Paranjape writes that killing the Father “is not the same as eliminating his influence or presence”. However much India’s elites and middle classes have attempted to relegate Gandhi to the margins, engaging in campaigns of slander, obfuscation, and trivialization, Gandhi continues to surface in the most unexpected ways. He is the (sometimes hidden) face of most of India’s most significant ecological movements, from the Chipko agitation to the Narmada Bachao Andolan, just as he is the face of intellectual dissent, little insurrections, and social upheaval. 

When the Polish workers rose against their authoritarian regime in the late 1980s, they talked of Lech Walesa as their Gandhi, a curious description of the Vodka-guzzling trade-union leader. When Benito Aquino of Philippines was assassinated, the same chant was raised by the crowd,  `Benito, our Gandhi'. Protesting crowds often hold posters of Gandhi and Che Guevara together, two leaders whose world-views were diametrically opposite to each other. The crowd would not even know who these people are.  As Ashis Nandy writes in an article Gandhi after Gandhi, 'For above all, this Gandhi is a symbol of those struggling against injustice, while trying to retain their humanity even when faced with unqualified inhumanity.'

'My father, do not rest. Do not allow us to rest', said Sarojini Naidu in her broadcast on All India Radio on February 1, 1948, after Gandhi's assassination. "I am not going to keep quiet even after I die”, Gandhi had once declared. The character of Gandhi in the Hindi film Lage Raho Munnabhai says, ‘I was shot down many years ago but my ideas will not die by three bullets, my thoughts will create a chemical imbalance in some mind or the other. Either you put me inside a frame and hang me up on your wall or think over my thoughts.’ After the assassination of Martin Luther King, a cartoon appeared in an American newspaper where Gandhi says to King in heaven:

 

Gandhi strived to live a life in politics which promoted moral values that transcended self-interest and political arrogance. He had come to the conclusion that democracy, like any other aspect of social and political life, would not function in the framework of a meaningless civilization with no sense of ethics and spirituality. His view was that a satyagrahi should wrestle with ’the coil of the snake’ of politics without being bitten by the lust for power. In Gandhi's Theory of Society and Our Times, A. K. Saran says:

. . . if Gandhi was not just a colonial leader who happened to achieve some kind of world fame, but, on the contrary, is a universal figure with relentless and steadfast concern with the destiny of man, then the central question raised by Gandhi, his thought, life and work, is the question of its relevance to our times and this is nothing else or no less than this: Has the voice of sanity any chance at all against the dark, demonic powers of our times?

Gandhi’s critical attitude toward modern civilization is an effort in asking the right questions at the right time about the whole inherited ideas on thought and action. He recognized that the advance of modernity coincides with the banishment of the small man to the sidelines. His ideas are a challenge both to Marxism and laissez-faire economics, which both count on pure economic forces for harmony or justice to prevail. All subtle ideas can be trivialized by portrayal in uncompromising and absolute terms. Don’t underestimate the power of steady misrepresentation.

Gandhi's challenging and fundamental questions discomfit many which makes him inspirational as well as annoying to different sections. The latter group is much larger especially in India and it is even more so because his ideas demand more attention, not less, since his death. He set a bar for ethical action in politics which is unlikely to be ever met in the future and certainly is well beyond the comprehension of the present breed of Indian politicians. They have managed to create a society in which someone like Gandhi would be at a huge disadvantage. That is the tragedy of our times. 

While information and knowledge lies ahead of us and is made more easily accessible by technology, all wisdom seems to be already behind us. As Antonio Gramsci succinctly puts it, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born -- now is the time of monsters.” Gandhi’s message of religious tolerance and non-violence is much more relevant today amidst the religious turmoil and political divisiveness around the world. The quality of his thought has sometimes been lost because of the other images Gandhi has - a shrewd politician and a deeply spiritual figure.  

A group of scholars, thinkers and writers gathered at the Sabarmati Ashram to once again reflect on Gandhi's death as absence and memory. Speaking of Gandhi’s Death brings together these reflections. In it, Ashis Nandy is quoted as saying:

Today, there is an all-round attempt to make Gandhi respectable. I see a lot of young faces in front of me. I hope you will avoid the temptation of seeing Gandhi as someone respectable, as somebody that your parents would like you to be like. 

I would rather want you to see Gandhi as disreputable, unpredictable, at the margins of sanity, and at the margins of everyday life; someone who dares to ask you to look even at your everyday life and your public life, and ask, is it possible for us to envision, to re-visualize or imagine a different kind of public or private life? Is it possible to live everyday life and yet look beyond its everydayness, and is it possible to contaminate your everyday life or the life of the people around you with that vision?”

PS: One of the best tennis quotes of all time was made by Vitas Gerulaitis. He lost 16 matches in a row to Bjorn Borg. He finally won his 17th match and growled at the press conference held later, 'Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row.' After reading 37 posts in a row about Gandhi (I had planned over 50 posts!), I can imagine at least one of the two of you still reading these posts,  muttering darkly, 'Nobody makes me read 38 posts in a row about Gandhi.' Have no fear. I have decided to end this series with this post. 

PPS: Some have generously observed over the years that I am intellectually reasonably competent. After reading about my admiration for Gandhi, you may be convinced that such observations are grossly exaggerated. Daniel Kahneman has some words for you In Thinking, Fast and Slow that will make you exclaim, 'I told you so.' 

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among collage undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. In an article titled “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly,” he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility. 

Arundhati Roy on Gandhi - 12a

Stories persuade. As Yuval Noah Harari wrote, the persuasive power of stories distinguished homo sapiens in the animal kingdom. “Much of history,” he said, “revolves around this question: How does one persuade millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work toward common goals.” Whether it was joining forces to fend off a predator or to sail across oceans, the early sapiens persuaded and flourished by telling stories. The most important things in the world exist only in our imagination. But, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. 

It is common to imagine that only oppressive societies benefit from cultivating public emotions. Yet orators like Gandhi understood the need to reach out and inspire strong emotions in people to inspire them to do the right thing. Kurt Vonnegut says about one woman, 'She was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction.' Both Gandhi and Hitler seemed to pull similar strings but told stories that pulled their people in opposite directions. In John Dewey’s words, 

“a renewal of faith in common human nature, in its potentialities in general, and in its power in particular to respond to reason and truth, is a surer bulwark against totalitarianism than a demonstration of material success or a devout worship of special legal and political forms.”  

Many people in Gandhi's time and now (especially educated, city-dwelling folk) find his spartan requirements, his vegetarian diet, his preference for natural methods of healing, celibacy, etc.hard to understand. In the first half of the 20th century, communism had a lot of appeal among many educated people. These people saw Gandhi as an obscurantist because of his use of religious metaphors for communication rather than a secular-scientific one, because he preached a moderation of rather than giving-in to one's desires, and strict insistence on non-violence rather than on more manly (to them) violent revolutionary methods. Zygmunt Bauman writes in  Globalization: The Human Consequences:

Not asking certain questions is pregnant with more dangers than failing to answer the questions already on the official agenda; while asking the wrong kind of questions all too often helps to avert eyes from the truly important issues. 

The price of silence is paid in the hard currency of human suffering. . . Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of the services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.

Gandhi questioned what had been taken as settled. He had a positive view of human nature. He was fond of quoting the Mohammedan saying adam khuda nahin lekin khuda ka noor adam se juda nahin (Man is not God but neither is he different from the spark of God). He often said that human nature will find itself only when it fully realizes that to become human it had to cease to be bestial or brutal. He was convinced that without the attainment of the virtue of non-violence, we will share the qualities of ‘our remote reputed ancestor the orangutan’. He was of the view that human beings will stop growing when they cease distinguishing between virtue and vice.

An aspect of Gandhi’s thought which is relevant today is his understanding of the relation between the great world faiths. ’The time is now passed,’ he said, ’when the followers of one religion can stand and say, ours is the only true religion and all others are false’ (Indian Opinion, August 26, 1905). He was particularly influenced by a Jain, Raychandbhai, who introduced him to the idea of the many-sidedness of reality (anekantavada), so that many different views may all be valid. And this includes religious views. Gandhi shared the ancient Hindu assumption that ’Religions are different roads converging at the same point. What does it matter that we take different roads so long as we reach the same goal?' 

He regarded it as pointless, because impossible, to grade the great world faiths in relation to each other. ’No one faith is perfect. All faiths are equally dear to their respective votaries. What is wanted, therefore, is a living friendly contact among the followers of the great religions of the world and not a clash among them in the fruitless attempt on the part of each community to show the superiority of its own faith over the rest. His ’doctrine of the Equality of Religions’, as it has been called, did not move towards a single global religion, but enjoins us all to become better expressions of our own faith, being enriched in the process by influences from other faiths. 

The day after Gandhi was assassinated, a foreign journalist was in South India and witnessed millions of people torn by grief. He had never seen something like this before and asked somebody to explain the phenomenon. The person said, 'Gandhi held up a mirror which showed us the best we could possibly be. Now we fear that the mirror has been shattered.' In Gandhi in His Time and Ours, David Hardiman writes that there have been great moral activists like Mandela, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X etc. (some of whom do not endorse Gandhi's policy of adhering to non-violence at all times) whose quality of leadership parallels that of Gandhi. He writes:

The moral activist puts her or his life on the line by challenging the 'system' to do its worst. Too often, the challenge is taken up, and the activist has been murdered. Each such violent and premature death has been a tragic setback. There is however hope, for people of such ethical power have again and again emerged to pose the question in new ways and to suggest new answers. They have not been perfect beings - they have had their human weaknesses and sometimes made great mistakes. 

Their personal family lives have often been sad, even tragic. But still, they are people who in their fierce and uncompromising moral commitment have soared above those around them. They stand for a human spirit that refuses to be crushed by the leviathan of the modern 'system' of violence, oppression and exploitation, and which aspires for a better, more equitable and non-violent future. In this, they inspire huge numbers. In them, Gandhi - their model - still lives.

Arundhati Roy on Gandhi - 11

 Arundhati Roy says that Gandhi often talked about Ram Rajya but does not say how it is different from the Ram Rajya mentioned by the Hindu Right thereby giving the impression that both are same. That Gandhi’s Ram, by his own admission, had no relation to the Ram worshipped by many Hindus is of no consequence. Modi’s alleged adherence to Gandhi’s ideal of ‘Ram Rajya’ is mentioned by critics, some of whom have long thought of Gandhi as a Hindu chauvinist. This was hardly the case.

Like many other successful leaders, who were great communicators, Gandhi explored the common Indian’s belief system, his awareness of his myths, his strong religious orientation, etc. to make his experience and thoughts readily intelligible to the masses. Among the many insights that he bequeathed is the insight that the most effective strategies for achieving change are, in the long run, those that employ reconstructions of a tradition's inherited symbols rather than strategies that discard those symbols for alien ones. But he did not use traditional symbols blindly. ‘It is good to swim in the waters of tradition but to sink in them is suicide.’ He used traditional Indian symbols to promote novel values and thereby convey a contemporary socio-political message. 

He clothed revolutionary ideas with familiar terms so that they were readily adopted and used for perusing revolutionary ends. Merely dismissing him as a Hindu revivalist because of his use of traditional terms like swaraj, ramrajya, tapasya, Panchayati Raj, etc. is a superficial reading. He infused these familiar terms with considerations that are reminiscent of the rational, humanist tradition of the West and which were unavailable in Indian tradition. Again and again we see Gandhi use phrases emerging out of established ways and familiar institutions to transmit newly created values. In like manner, he used the term Ramrajya to communicate with a largely illiterate population that was intimately familiar with India’s epic lore. 

To orthodox Muslims, this aroused a fear that he intended Hindu rule. But he clarified that Ram and Rahim were the same and he acknowledged ‘no other God but the God of truth and righteousness’. He felt that 'Ram Rajya' came closest to what Christians meant by 'the kingdom of God' and what Muslims meant by 'Khudai Raj' (God's reign). Hindu, Christian and Muslim traditions were trying to promote the idea of perfect justice and he  felt that not to use the term for the sake of appearing to be politically correct would have been 'self-suppression and hypocrisy'. His ideal of Ram Rajya had nothing to do with theocracy of any kind. 

The term Ramarajya figuratively expresses "the reign of ideal justice, perfect democracy or the reign of self-imposed law of moral restraint." Above all, the Gandhian state was purely a secular state and he made it transparently clear. In the Amrit Bazar Patrika of August 2, 1934, he said: “Ramayana of my dreams ensures equal rights to both prince and pauper.” Gandhi’s vision of the ideal society is that of a non-violent and democratic social order in which there is a just balance between individual freedom and social responsibility. Such a reign can never be realized in the institutions of society and has to be seen as an ideal that one has to strive for.

While the current government pushes for 'Ram, Ramayan and Ramrajya' it is pertinent to note that Gandhi had dismissed the idea of Ramrajya when India was on the verge of Independence. Writing in the Harijan on June 1, 1947, just two months before Independence, Gandhi lamented that “there can be no Ram Rajya in the present state of iniquitous inequalities in which a few roll in riches and the masses do not get even enough to eat!” 

Both the Hindu Right and Gandhi used phrases and precepts found in Hindu scriptures. But it was the manner in which each used the traditional and the familiar which set them at opposite poles. Gandhi's religious inclinations did not prevent him from being reasonable or to accept the results of empirical tests. The eclectic element in Gandhi's religious thought resulted in a denial of dogma while the typical slogan of extreme Hindu groups is 'Hinduize all politics and militarize Hinduism'. 

After Gandhi's removal from the political scene (much to the relief of who Ashis Nandy calls the 'moderns', who were wedded to secular statecraft), the intelligentia abandoned the field of religion as something that the poor, illiterate villagers pursued. The innovations he brought about had no effective champion and the meanings of many traditionally terms reverted to that of the Hindu Right. The separation of religion and politics has not kept religion out of politics. It has only resulted in the more unacceptable and anti-democratic forms of religion to gain more power and visibility. When we abandon symbols of religious tolerance, others appropriate them, which is what has now happened with Gandhi's legacy.  

In his essay An Anti-secularist Manifesto, Ashis Nandy writes about these regressive forces: ‘Instead of making religious use of politics, they make political use of religion, turning it into an instrument of political mobilization within a psephocratic model – a model in which elections and elected ‘kings’ dominate the system.’ Instead of being a means of expressing cultural values, religion has become a legitimate instrument for perusing personal and group self-interest. Instead of private faith and public agnosticism, what has become dominant is public faith and private agnosticism. Gandhi once said that 'religions are only as good or as bad as their professors make them out to be'. 

The original Preamble to the Constitution described India as a “sovereign democratic republic”. The framers of the Constitution felt confident enough in India as a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-lingual civilization that they did not have to insert “secular” into the Preamble.  They did not think of secularism as a mechanical separation of ‘church’ from ‘state’ but looked both to India’s syncretic past and to everyday practices of inter-faith communities to shape their view of a secular state. They took their cue from Gandhi who derived his secularism from being a devout Hindu, just as Maulana Azad derived it from being a devout Muslim. That Mrs. Gandhi had to explicitly affirm the “secular” nature of India in 1976 suggests that the rot had already set in.

Arundhati Roy on Gandhi - 10c

Gandhi had a deep and abiding commitment to preserving individual autonomy. This factor is central to his views about the state, economy, society and individual – about modernity in general. For Gandhi, the major economic issue is whether people control the process of production or are controlled by it. He is surprised by claims that modern technologies give people more control over their lives  than earlier ones. He finds both capitalism and socialism adopting the same blind worship of technology without bothering about their social and ethical consequences. In Liquid Modernity, Zigmunt Bowman looks at how individual autonomy has been eroded in the modern economy.

In the initial stage of industrialization, capital, management and labor all had to stay in one another's company. They were tied down by the combination of huge factory buildings, heavy machinery and massive labor forces. This invisible chain riveting the workers to their working places and arresting their mobility was, in the words of the Sorbonne economist Daniel Cohen, 'the heart of Fordism. This chain has now been broken.' Who starts a career in Microsoft', observes Cohen, 'has no idea where it is going to end. Starting with Ford or Renault, entailed on the contrary the near certitude that the career would run its course in the same place. '

Cohen said that Henry Ford decided one day to 'double' the wages of his workers with the (publicly) declared reason being ‘I want my workers to be paid well enough to buy my cars'. But the workers' purchases formed a small fraction of his sales, while their wages made a much greater part of his costs. The real reason to raise the wages was the huge turnover of the labor force. Ford decided to give the workers a raise in order to fix them to the chain. He wanted to make the money invested in their training and drill pay for the duration of the working lives of his workers.

During this period of industrialization, labor and capital had to stay in same place. Workers depended on being hired for their livelihood; capital depended on hiring them for its reproduction and growth. That requirement brought capital and labor face to face which resulted in much conflict, but also a lot of mutual accommodation. But now labour and capital are no longer interdependent. Capital, which means power, can move with the speed of the electronic signal  and so it can move its essential ingredients instantaneously. Labour, on the other hand, remains as immobilized as it was in the past .

The mobility of capital has become the paramount source of uncertainty for all the rest. A 'short-term' mentality has come to replace the 'long-term' one. The reproduction and growth of capital, profits and dividends and the satisfaction of stockholders have all become largely independent from the duration of any particular local engagement. No more do the partners expect to stay long in each other's company. 'Flexibility' is the slogan of the day and it means the advent of work on short-term contracts, rolling contracts or no contracts, positions with no in-built security but with the 'until further notice' clause. Working life is saturated with uncertainty.

It is the people who cannot move quickly, people who cannot at will leave their place at all, who are ruled. There are a large number of workers tied to the assembly line or to the computer networks and electronic automated devices like check-out points. Nowadays, they tend to be the most expendable parts of the economic system. Neither particular skills, nor the art of social interaction with clients are listed in their job requirements - and so they are easiest to replace. Nor are there many skills which, once acquired, would guarantee secure employment. 

No one can reasonably assume to be insured against the next round of 'downsizing', 'streamlining' or 'rationalizing', against erratic shifts of market demand and whimsical yet irresistible pressures of 'competitiveness', 'productivity' and 'effectiveness' Even the most privileged position may prove to be vulnerable. Most people in the modern economy know that they are disposable, and so they see little point in developing attachment or commitment to their jobs. 

The uncertainty is a powerful individualizing force. It divides instead of uniting, and since there is no telling who will wake up the next day in what division, the idea of 'common interests' loses all pragmatic value. Once the employment of labour has become short-term and precarious there is little chance for mutual loyalty and commitment to develop. This results in the falling apart of effective agencies of collective action and this state of affairs helps power-holders to consolidate power. 

The mobility of capital has made the modern state powerless. While all the agencies of political life stay within the boundaries of the state, power flows well beyond their reach and thus outside citizens’ control. Capital has acquired enough mobility in most cases to blackmail territory-bound political agencies into submission to its demand. The threat of cutting local ties and moving elsewhere slows down capacities of local powers. 

A government has little choice but to implore and cajole capital to fly in by 'creating better conditions for free  enterprise', which means, using all the regulating power at the government's disposal for deregulation, of dismantling and scrapping the existing 'enterprise constraining' laws and statutes. This means low taxes, fewer or no rules and above all a 'flexible labour market'. More generally, it means a docile population, unable and unwilling to put up an organized resistance to whatever decision the capital might yet take. 

Paradoxically, governments can hope to keep capital in place only by convincing it beyond reasonable doubt that it is free to move away. Governments that don't play ball incur severe costs, generally economic. They may be refused loans or denied reduction of their debts; local currencies would be speculated against and pressed to devalue; local stocks would fall on the global exchanges; the country may face economic sanctions; global investors would withdraw their assets. As Zigmunt Bowman says in Liquid Modernity:

For that reason they [the local population] are exposed, armless, to the inscrutable whims of mysterious 'investors' and 'shareholders', and even more bewildering 'market forces', 'terms of trade' and 'demands of competition'.

Readers like to say that they have ‘really grasped’ the intended meanings of dead authors, whose texts belong to a context. It’s important to recognize that the act of reading past texts is always an exercise in selection. There are no ‘true’ and ‘faithful’ readings of what others have written. They push beyond familiar horizons, towards ‘wild’ perspectives that force us to rethink things that we have so far taken for granted. 

A literal reading of Gandhi's writings would be misleading. His specific solutions of spinning or adopting village life are inapplicable in today's context. It is more important to look at the concerns which led him to adopt his specific solutions. Gandhi viewed modern society as one in which efficacies overwhelm individuals and traditions are under siege. He viewed with concern the growth of centralized political and economic power and the resulting attenuation of human liberty. 

Gandhi is not bothered about lists of ‘human rights’ prepared by somebody, but how institutional  arrangements result in people being treated. Are they humiliated or dominated? Are there asymmetrical distributions of power which constrain people’s choices? Are people free to make moral decisions on their own or are they forced towards choices of a particular sort? He knew that when people think they know the good, they assume that this gives them the license to impose it on others regardless of the costs it imposes on the latter.

He finds that in the modern industrial economy, those in power are willing to use other human beings as means to achieve their own ends. He continually works to design institutional arrangements that lessen the costs to ordinary people of meeting their moral responsibilities. He recognizes that when honesty is severely penalized by institutions, it invites harm not only for the person but also for the people who depend on him. He wants to build an ideal society in which people follow the good without having to undergo huge personal sacrifices. He thought when people want to be honest but cannot be so because of institutional constraints, hypocrisy will increase. 

Arundhati Roy on Gandhi - 10b

According to Gandhi, people who are poverty-stricken, destitute and homeless have to focus on issues of livelihood and cannot be blamed for not taking part in his moral exhortations. He said that people cannot ignore basic biological needs like hunger and sleep and they had to take care of their health. The moral development of people could come only after they had satisfied their basic needs and were not at the mercy of hunger and destitution. He said that for such people 'liberty, God and all such words are merely letters put together without the slightest meaning'. He thus insisted that in a good economy, everyone's basic needs are met first. 

Gandhi made a sharp distinction between the Dharma of the common man or the masses and that of the power elite. He said that although “primary virtues” can be cultivated by “the meanest of the human species,” the more austere ones were to be followed by the elite. The more power a person had the greater the demands that Gandhi made on him which is the opposite of what happens today. He said in Young India on 15-10-1931, 'It is good enough to talk of God whilst we are sitting here after a nice breakfast and looking forward to a nicer luncheon. But how am I to talk of God to the millions who have to go without two meals a day? To them God can only appear as bread and butter.' 

He subscribed to the thesis that power corrupts but he also stressed the fact that powerlessness corrupts even more. He insisted that if political independence is achieved without restructuring the society, it would be an empty prize. 'It would be folly to assume that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than the American one.' The voluntary poverty that he adopted was to identify with the way of life of millions who suffered from forced poverty and to serve as a constant reminder to the elites about the existence of these millions. Being a master at communicating through symbols, he used his own person as a symbol. 

He also did not ignore the institutional constraints that prevent people from pursuing their moral choices. He asserted that only choices that an individual makes out of his own free will without any outside pressure has any moral worth. Gandhi finds that in the modern economy individuals increasingly lose control of the productive process. He felt that modernity renders individuals impotent by making them subservient to institutions and unable to act according to the dictates of their conscience. He emphasizes that things are not always what they seem and continually draws attention to what is ignored. 

He recognizes that the costs involved for a person in pursuing his moral principles are often high. Although theoretically it is possible for a person to be fearless and resist domination (as he himself did), he recognized that it is not possible for most people to bear the costs of such resistance. You may be free to pursue pleasures and comforts but  you may not be free to make moral choices as you see fit. You will always be captive to fear and live at the mercy of the powerful. But while institutions often compel people to act dishonestly, he was also not in favour of anyone being forced to perform a good act. He said in Harijan on September 29, 1946:

The mind of a man who is good under compulsion cannot be good; in fact it gets worse. And when compulsion is removed all the defects well up to the surface with even greater force. 

He argues that in any economy, 'the individual is the one supreme consideration'. He fears that when abstract principles like economic growth or the benefit of firms become the focus of attention then people become means for some glittering but elusive end. Keeping the same principle in mind, he rejects machinery when it ceases 'to help the individual and encroaches upon his individuality'. He thought that the drive for power is innate in human beings and the only way to control it was to have it as widely distributed in the society as possible. He considered both modern capitalism and communism inadequate for the task because though they distributed goods differently, they relied on the same productive process. 

Both capitalism and communism share a deep commitment to the centralized, urban industrial model as the the solution to all economic  ills – only the power-wielders change and most people are reduced to being mere cogs in the wheel in both systems. Both result in what Max Weber calls the 'separation of the worker from his means of production' – the worker is dependent upon the implements that the state or a few individuals put at his disposal. In an interview in September, 1940, he said, 'Pandit Nehru wants industrialization because he thinks that, if it is socialized, it would be free from the evils of capitalism. My own view is that the evils are inherent in industrialism, and no amount of socialization can eradicate them.' 

Gandhi was always concerned about ownership of an asset because power would be in the hands of whoever owned it. To a socialist friend who queried him on his views on electricity he said: 'If we could have electricity in every village home, I should not mind villagers plying their implements and tools with the help of electricity. But then the village communities or the state would own power houses, just as they have their grazing pastures.' All the ongoing well-meaning efforts to generate livelihoods and reduce poverty may be futile without challenging the pyramidlike structure of the economy where power is concentrated in the few at the top who own the productive assets. 

Arundhati Roy on Gandhi - 10a

Arundhati Roy says, '. . . it was Gandhi's business to accumulate power, which he did effectively.' What Gandhi accumulated was moral power not executive power. He was president of the Congress for only one year, was not even a primary member of the Congress from the mid 1930s onwards and did not occupy any official position in independent India. His political activities were characterized by what can be described as 'passionate detachment'. It is telling that when his political authority was at its lowest towards the end of his life, his moral power was at its highest. Louis Fischer writes in Mahatma Gandhi – His Life & Times:

Gandhi had more than influence, he had authority, which is less yet better than power. Power is the attribute of a machine: authority is the attribute of a person. Statesmen are varying combinations of both. The dictator's constant accretion of power, which he must inevitably abuse, steadily robs him of authority. Gandhi's rejection of power enhanced his authority. Power feeds on the blood and tears of its victims. Authority is fed by service, sympathy and affection.

In Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse defines finite games as the structures in our life – societies, nations, war, dating, careers – that have a clear beginning and end, willing participants, boundaries, opponents, winners and losers, and competition for titles or possessions. The purpose of finite play is to bring the game to a conclusion. It is competing for a ranking or status: to be the best lawyer or the best yogi. They are the familiar contests of everyday life, the games we play in business and politics, at home and in competitive sports.

This is in contrast to ‘infinite games’ which Carse describes as games played with the intention of continuing play (rather than ending it to declare a winner). The purpose of infinite play is to allow the game to go on and bring as many other people as possible into the game. Infinite players recognize that most of social hierarchy is a form of play (drama, performance, roles). “The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.” The prevailing wisdom is to encourage finite play. Gandhi was the consummate infinite player. Carse writes that 

‘Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.’

Arundhati Roy makes a pertinent observation:

Gandhi always said that he wanted to live like the poorest of the poor. The question is, can poverty be simulated? Poverty, after all, is not just a question of having no money or no possessions.  Poverty is about having no power. As a politician, it was Gandhi's business to accumulate power, which he did effectively. . . If you are powerful, you can live simply, but you cannot be poor. In South Africa, it took a lot of farmland and organic fruit trees to keep Gandhi in poverty. 

Arndhhati Roy is seriously under-estimating Gandhi if she thinks that he was not aware of the unequal distribution of power in Indian society and modern societies in general (the loss of individual autonomy lay at the center of his criticisms of modernity with its worship of rationality and science.) His notion of swaraj was far more expansive than that of Congress or other Indian elites because of his concern about the unequal distribution of power in society. 

Machiavelli, whose name has become synonymous with the cunning and amoral use of power, wrote 500 years ago that “the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearance, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are”. Gandhi knew very well that those in power try to seduce others into conformity by forcing particular interpretations of the world down others’ throats. He contended that most modern systems of power are dependent on hierarchy and deception. 

Gandhi is not satisfied with conventional definitions of power which tend to concentrate on political power. Even here he sees political power hiding deceptively behind elaborate ceremonies and becomes visible only when power is abused. Gandhi saw power resting not only in the authority of the state but also in ideology (eg. the power of modernity), social practices (eg. Untouchability) and the structure of the economy. He saw democracy reducing but not eliminating the problem of power. He thinks that terms like efficiency, order, productivity, growth etc. erode the autonomy of people and he means to rob them of their self-importance. 

He insisted that merely overthrowing British rule and replacing it with an all-Indian government was not going to bring swaraj. It would only result in replacing white sahibs with brown sahibs. It would have to be a society where existing forms of domination like untouchability and the forces of modernity and modernization (which he believed caused large-scale unemployment) would have to go. According to Gandhi, complete Indian independence 'means the consciousness in the average villager that he is the maker of his own destiny'. That was why he spent a lot of time on social work and reviving village industries which the Congress considered a distraction from the main task of winning political freedom.

Arundhati Roy on Gandhi - 9f

 The mandate to resist violence by non-violence is a general mandate, and, like all general mandates, it admits of exceptions depending on persons, circumstances, time and place. 'The fact is that the path of duty [dharma] is not always easy to discern amidst claims seeming to conflict with the other.' Gandhi  was called a 'practical idealist'; the 'practical' part should not be forgotten. The British conservative Michael Joseph Oakeshott said, 'Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of its purposes.' 

We live in times when hyper-masculine nationalism preaches the ideas of violent masculinity among the youth. Gandhian politics of trust seems like a farfetched dream. The increasing demand for machismo placed on the young population by the current discourse on nationalism leads to lack of any regard for the affective coexistence and it breeds mistrust and competition as the way of life. Mistrust leads to fear of the ‘other’- the unknown. This fear leads to violence against the religious minorities, refugees, migrants and ‘others’ who cannot be trusted. 

We live in a world and a culture that celebrates and is constantly normalizing brutality by moralizing, legalizing, and popularizing violence. The political climate brings more violence to the forefront, as aggression has been continuously explained away and even celebrated. The narratives of importance of national security and glorification of warrior figures of the past normalizes militarism. Dehumanizing propaganda spread by planners of genocide help in violence. Almost every movie shows that violence is the best and final solution to every problem. Officially sanctioned murder is hidden under bland terms like 'collateral damage' or 'neutralized' the enemy. 

Every video game I am shown is about shooting and killing. There is a celebration of police encounters and military weapon displays and the militarization of the consciousness. From militarism to aggressive/hyper-competitive sports carnivals, we see the sanctification of violence. The divorce between producers and consumers in the modern economy aids in the social production of moral indifference. Our moral capacities have not been able to keep up with the rapid expansion of our cognitive skills. Anthony Parel says in Gandhi's Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony:

The factual presence of violence in social life forced Gandhi to adjust the scope of his ethics to that reality. Hence the goal of Gandhian non-violence was not the total elimination of violence from social life, for that was impossible . . . but the gradual reduction of its intensity and frequency. It would be utopian to think of the total elimination of violence. But to think of reducing its volume and extent would be realistic. 

With Gandhi, the notion of nonviolence attained a special status. He made us understand that the philosophy of nonviolence is not a weapon of the weak; it is a weapon, which can be tried by all. Nonviolence was not Gandhi's invention. He is however called the father of nonviolence because he was probably the first in human history to extend the principle of nonviolence from the individual to the social and political planes.

Antoinette Tuff was working in the front office of an Atlanta School when a 20-year-old gunman stormed in with an AK-47 assault rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition.  Rational actors say that ‘the only rational response to terrorism is police action’ and that negotiation is ‘fainthearted’. I came across one of these rational actors say, ‘Survival is impossible without police action in times of crisis, and the tacit threat of it at all times. This is the price we pay for civilization.’ Fortunately, Mrs. Tuff was not a devotee of such a ‘lifeboat ethics’ view of civilization. 

When Tuff met the gunman, she told him that she was also a troubled soul like him. She told him about her life struggles: how her marriage had fallen apart after over 30 years and her struggles with opening her own business. Tuff's response was very different from whatever response he had expected and he was not sure how to react. She convinced the gunman to put his weapons aside and allow the police come in to take him to the hospital, since he’d told her that he had not been taking some of the medication he needed to and that he was not mentally stable.

More than 800 students and 100 employees were at the school that day; not one was injured after the gunman surrendered peacefully to the police. In an interview, she said that she saw ‘someone that was hurting, and did not need me to judge or pass judgment on them, show anger or be frustrated or mad at him. But I seen [sic] a young man in an unstable condition mind needing me to show him love.’ There were two security systems in place that day: one was the expected, expensive, violent 'rational response' that failed and the other was a quiet old nonviolent lady who succeeded. (Of course, the incident was reported a lot less breathlessly than would have been the case if there had been a massacre.)

It has always been assumed that nonviolence is a wonderful ideal, but that if one wants to achieve results, violence is the means to choose. Nonviolence, it is said, is the weapon of the weak, to be employed only when violent options seem totally out of reach. In Why Civil Resistance Works : The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth assembled a comprehensive data set of 323 violent and nonviolent campaigns between 1900 and 2006 and their findings challenge this conventional wisdom.  They found that nonviolent campaigns were nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as were violent campaigns and that the advantage for nonviolent campaigns held even when controlling for the authoritarianism of the regime. 

Nonviolent campaigns turned out to be more effective for both regime change and resistance to foreign occupation. The only purpose for which nonviolent campaigns were not more successful than violent ones was political secession. A campaign’s commitment to nonviolent methods enhances its domestic and international legitimacy and encourages more broad-based participation in the resistance by presenting fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment.  The higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo).

They cause shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Whereas governments easily justify violent counterattacks against armed insurgents, regime violence against nonviolent movements is more likely to backfire against the regime. Nonviolent resistance campaigns appear to be more open to negotiation and bargaining because they do not threaten the lives or well-being of members of the target regime. Given a credible alternative, the public is more likely to support a nonviolent campaign. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. As Lewis Mumford says in Technics And Civilization:

Physical power is a rough substitute for patience and intelligence and cooperative effort in the governance of men: if used as a normal accompaniment of action instead of a last resort it is a sign of extreme social weakness.