Gandhi’s Critique of the State

In the final year of British rule, Lord Louis Mountbatten was appointed as the last Viceroy of India, tasked with overseeing a British exit. This willingness to exit was not a move of good nature on the part of the British, but a result of a long-​fought Independence movement resisting the British regime. The Indian Independence Movement was unique in scale and strategy. In terms of scale, it was one of the largest independence movements in history. Strategically, civil disobedience and noncooperation framed the critical elements of resisting British rule.

The Indian Independence movement saw 390 million people freed from British rule. Its sheer magnitude leads us to ask: how did 390 million people capture freedom stolen from them by their British colonizers 200 years prior?

The linkage from tyranny to independence was one bolstered with a strong and strategic philosophical background. The prime political theory behind the movement was that of Swaraj, a philosophy that translates to self-​rule. It typically refers to sovereignty and independence from foreign domination or even centralized domination. Political thinker, lawyer, and freedom fighter Mohandas Gandhi, who notably remains one of the most revered figures of the movement, outlined a philosophy that is deeply religious yet anarchist in nature.

Examining Gandhi’s political philosophy reveals an incisive critique of the state, informed by religious practice. A religious appeal was a critical element to garner support in one of the world’s most religious countries, home to (at the time) 275 million Hindus, 50 million Muslims, 7 million Christians, 6 million Sikhs, 100,000 Parsis, and 24,000 Jews. Gandhi advocated for a stateless society in which men were ruled only by themselves - eschewing materialism and operating under the laws of God, cultivating a rich spiritual life.

Gandhi’s critique of the state was predictable to libertarians; it saw the state as an inherently violent, coercive actor. The heart and soul of Gandhi’s religious convictions and the independence movement was non-​violence, or ahimsa. He viewed the state as an irreparably violent force that could never coexist with his philosophy of non-​violence.

Gandhi’s critique of the state is intuitive to libertarians; he believed the state “can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.” The state’s power to enforce laws, regulations, and imprison people are all commands backed by the threat of violence against those who do not comply. To him, the increase of state power was directly correlated with increases in violence. The compulsion inherent in the nature of the state-​led Gandhi to characterize the state as a “soulless machine.” His philosophy bordered upon a unique blend of Hinduism and anarchism. In what he called enlightened anarchy, Gandhi envisioned a world where “everyone is his own ruler.”

Religious anarchism, of course, was not a philosophy exclusive to Gandhi’s ethics. Because his philosophy was so based on religion, Gandhi drew heavily upon classical Hindu texts and poets as well as Vedic philosophy, a body of religious texts that form the oldest Hindu scriptures. However, he also drew from names that are familiar to anarchist thought in the West. In his formative years as a lawyer in South Africa from 1893 to 1915, he read writers like Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy. He was drawn to these authors because they spoke directly to the vision for India he had during independence; both writers bolstered his arguments for resistance and a stateless society.

Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience resonated with Gandhi profoundly, especially during the pre-​Independence era. He praised Civil Disobedience for its “incisive logic” that was “unanswerable.” More importantly, he found it to be a practical guide as he believed that Thoreau “taught nothing he was not prepared to practice in himself.” This practicality was particularly exemplified during one of Gandhi’s most famous acts of passive resistance, the Salt March. Indians had to buy their salt from the British ruling over them, who imposed a heavy salt tax; Gandhi encouraged Indians to follow him to the Arabic coast in a march of resistance. Tens of thousands followed him in a powerful display of resistance and collected salt from the coast of the Arabian sea, avoiding British taxation. This famous march was emblematic of his Thoreau informed creed of civil disobedience.

His tradition of Thoreau’s civil disobedience did not just extend to resistance and independence - he also called upon these ideals in outlining his perfect state. Outlining his ideal state, Gandhi wrote in his weekly paper, Young India, that “there is no political power because there is no State. But the ideal is never fully realized in life. Hence the classical statement of Thoreau that government is best which governs the least.”

In addition to Thoreau, Gandhi read Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You and praised it as a work that left him an “abiding impression.” Tolstoy’s religious anarchism was similarly characterized by an embrace of non-​violent resistance. So profound was Tolstoy’s agreement with Gandhi that Tolstoy wrote him, arguing that the non-​violent resistance armed with the weapon of love was how the Indian people could achieve independence. They maintained a long correspondence until Tolstoy’s death in 1910.

Though Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian Independence movement was informed by a mixture of individualist, religious, and anarchist principles, his philosophy did not only extend to a critique of the state. His solution was unique, rooted in Vedic schools of thought revolving around decentralization, sustainability, and individual morality guiding community building.

His particular solution for the 700,000 villages of India in 1947 was swaraj - a term that, during the Independence movement, became synonymous with self-​rule. While this is typically known as freedom from foreign dependence and reliance, his vision for a post-​independence India was one of strong decentralization. Communities were to be self-​governing without a hierarchical structure, all while taking the individual as the primary unit of society. Gandhi emphasized the importance of social cohesion and caring for others, but he also saw individual morality as the basis for wider society. Thus, communities were defined by the individuals in them. Gandhi did not believe the will of the collective ought to subsume the will of the individual.

Gandhi’s philosophy is a form of individualist anarchism where liberation starts with individuals and then can be achieved by collectives, like villages. Villages were to be “self-​sustained” and “capable of managing its affairs. In his mind, then, it was ultimately “the individual who is the unit” assisted by “willing help from neighbors or from the world”; he envisioned a “free and voluntary play of mutual forces.” Non-​violence, to Gandhi, could only be realized by people ruling over themselves. Individuals, through their own will and without coercion, were to rule themselves and only upon this self-​rule, create larger community-​based units.

However, this is difficult to realize in practice. For Gandhi, the self-​governing villages had to be so self-​sustaining that they could defend themselves from all foreign adversaries and while also being capable of producing everything needed by civilians. While it may be difficult to realize in practice, the emphasis on decentralization is an area that can be realized in nearly any society. Those who continued to follow Gandhi even in the face of increasing political centralization can prioritize decentralization, self-​rule, and keeping the individual as the unit were all key facets in fostering a society that abided by the principle of non-​violence.

It is important to note that Gandhi’s political positions were strongly opposed to what he saw as creeping modernization and industrialization pushed by the West. However, this is because of his religious leanings, which informed nearly everything he did. Like many ascetics, he believed higher material growth led to moral depravity. He believed that rich men “did not advance the moral struggle of passive resistance as did the poor”, and that materialism was a “monster-​god” that stunted progress. Economists, in Gandhi’s mind, ought to investigate the laws of God alongside the reduction of poverty. He is not against machinery, but he refused to be mastered by it (4207), as is seen by his iconic spinning wheel to spin his cloth. His wheel was a symbol of his strong valuation of simple, non-​industrialized village labor.

However, he was not a socialist in the same manner as many leaders of the Independence movement. Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become the first Prime Minister of the newly independent India, most famously pushed for the socialist turn after Indian Independence. In his jail cell, thrown there for anti-​governmental activities in 1921, he dreamed of “reconciling on the soil of India the parliamentary democracy of England and economic socialism of Karl Marx (99).”

While Gandhi was notably an opponent of Western modernization brought upon by the Industrial revolution, his vision for India was a competing one against the Marxist tendencies of Nehru. His liberation philosophy was rooted in religion, not class warfare. While Gandhi held a profound critique of Western capitalism as incompatible with his religious ideals, he did not see the state as a viable tool to suppress it because “if the State suppressed capitalism by violence, it will be caught in the coils of violence itself, and fail to develop nonviolence at any time” (MR, October, 1935, p412). Indeed, in letters exchanged with Nehru throughout the Independence movement discussing economics, political theory, and independence, he made it clear that “in no case can I be party, irrespective of non-​violence, to a universal strike and capture of power” (4614).

Indian politicians did not take Gandhi’s path, instead adopting Nehru’s socialism. Eventually, economic liberalization in the 1990s modernized and opened up the economy while increasing India’s economic growth rate. However, while this increased India’s growth and GDP, it also brought India further into industrialization. Gandhi likely would have looked down on both paths as deviating far from the stateless, non-​industrialized religious society he imagined.

Despite India’s deviation from Gandhi’s ideals, his political philosophy is salient for the religious and non-​religious. For the religious, Gandhi’s call to engage in Godly pursuits instead of worldly pursuits may ring true. For the irreligious, one can appreciate the type of decentralization and minimal coercive state that Gandhi advocated. The struggle for freedom of a fifth of the world’s population demonstrates that his individualist, religious anarchist thought can mobilize masses to an incredible extent. Gandhi’s philosophy, like the philosophies of many philosophical anarchists, can seem impractical or ineffective. However, the spirit of swaraj was more effective than many theorists dubbed more pragmatic could ever hope to be in inspiring the freedom struggle of 390 million people.