How does gandhi define swaraj

For Gandhi, however, this would have been merely an intellectual explanation. He was adept at translating high philosophic concepts into the world of accessible thought and practices. In this understanding only if men and women are in control of their needs and passions and seek self-knowledge can political self-rule informed by fair institutions be established.

According to Gandhi this task is rendered difficult by modern civilization. For Gandhi it is the failure to cultivate the ethical and spiritual self that is responsible for many horrors of modern civilization. These horrors included colonialism, which was primarily about coveting the wealth of other nations to improve bodily comfort.

As a result the ability of imperial regimes to look within was eroded. In his world justice always prevailed over the word. But the rejection of religion, understood principally as the pursuit of truth through work on the self and service to humanity, was unacceptable to him.

His composite notion of duty accounted for his discomfort with the focus on the language of rights in modern civilization. He certainly did not reject the importance of rights. He therefore chose to speak of duties. Duties for him had two dimensions that were deeply entrenched in his understanding of the ontology of swaraj signifying both self-knowledge and self-rule. The first aspect points to work on the self. In recent times Michel Foucault has captured for me the Gandhian understanding on this subject.

It was a politics of emancipation to be achieved by the performance of duties to humankind through actively participating in struggles for equality and justice. It is the dialectic between work on the self and work on the world that would help establish the relationship to self. Gandhi therefore spoke of setting limits to our needs.

On the other hand, while Gandhi recognized that it was difficult to put the genie of industrialization back in the bottle, he did not reflect on the possibility of the reorganization of industrial societies in ways that would allow the ethical and spiritual self to surface. While he understood more deeply than Marx that the emancipated self would not emerge through transforming material structures alone he believed that industrial civilization and not merely capitalist industrialization had to be left behind to this end.

For in his experience industrial civilization stood for exploitation and imperialism. It also distorted social relations. Gandhi was therefore not against technologies such as the sewing machine as it did not replace or exploit human labour.

Most vitally for Gandhi, modern technology tends to distort the relationship to self. It is the cognitive dissonance that modern technology introduces in the relationship to the self that concerned him. Technological advances give rise to the belief that the control of the external world corresponds to the expansion of human freedom and the gaining of self-knowledge.

The idea of relationship to the self is thus displaced by technology to signify the development of the non-self. It allows the external gaze to have primacy over the inner self.

The undermining of the inner world is traced by Gandhi also to the fact that modern technological developments redefine social spaces. Yet, as I have already noted, Gandhi shared with Marx his critique of capitalism. While what Gandhi advanced was an ethical critique this critique was embedded in the labour theory of value.

While Gandhi laid great stress on equality and the need to remove class distinctions he simultaneously stressed that alienation could be overcome only through work on the self. According to this view a capitalist would, through a process of self-transformation, use profits for the welfare of society.

On the other hand, as I have learnt from Gandhi, modern civilization was not simply the doings of capital but also about modes of thinking that relegated to the margins the relationship to the self. Gandhi wished to remind modern civilization that unless the ethical and spiritual self was actively engaged the pain of alienation would remain even if capitalism were dethroned.

A key feature of his thinking was that the state should not have a strong presence in the everyday life of people for, if I may be allowed to put it this way, the ontology of the state clashes with the ontology of the self. Gandhi was also sceptical of bourgeois democracy. The individual and village community would become the basis of self-rule not merely because the state would not be overly present but because in the absence of modern industrial civilization an individual could better control his needs and passions, and perform his duties to the local community, in order to realize a higher self.

For, as already averred, in his experience industrial civilization and imperialism went hand in hand. There is an excess of international law today. What is more, international law is forgetful of the ethical and spiritual self. Indeed, the estrangement of international law from the ethical and spiritual self is the dark side of the project of unification of the world by global capital.

International laws have come to promote bodily comfort through facilitating the global production and circulation of consumer goods; much of international economic law serves this purpose. In short, what I have learnt from Gandhi is that international law and institutions need, as far as is possible, to leave nations alone in shaping their destiny.

Too much international regulation prevents swaraj. Incidentally, Gandhi held the firm opinion that no nation can be liberated by the effort of others. He was therefore against external intervention. Given the nature of present day modern civilization the global common good is rarely pursued in international relations and international laws. This condition perhaps explains why the rules on state responsibility demand obedience not on the basis of the ethical grounding of law but for reasons of its procedural rightness.

Gandhi was crit ical of this understanding. Modern international law for this very reason is oblivious to ethical reasoning. The international law of state responsibility allows no space for ethical dissent by nations. Gandhi wanted an individual who violated a bad law to accept responsibility for his actions. Indeed, the willingness to accept punishment was an integral part of his idea of satyagraha or the search for truth through self sacrifice.

Gandhi and his followers practised this understanding in the course of the anti-colonial struggle. They defied bad laws and were willing to go to jail for violating them.

From a Gandhian point of view nations that willingly disobey bad laws must accept the consequences of their actions, as a way of affirming the principle of self-determination. This standpoint offers the possibility of a novel mode of collective re sistance by states whose people are suffering because of bad laws. As the similarities in their approach and praxis are obvious, it is not necessary to elaborate on them. Gandhi had very clear ideas about the role to be played by the constructive work organisations and the proposed Lok Sevak Sangh in the reconstruction of India.

He made it clear that he would not hesitate to use nonviolent direct action against the new government headed by Nehru, his chosen heir. In his conversation with Louis Fischer, Gandhi made it unequivocally clear that mass satyagraha will have to be launched also against the landlords for persuading them to end their oppression and exploitation and that he was mentally preparing himself for that historic struggle for justice.

Although most of his prominent colleagues and contemporaries pinned their vision of transformation of society and polity on state power Gandhi cherished a deep-rooted suspicion of the state machinery. He defined the state as the most organised and concentrated form of violence and called it an impersonal entity, a soulless machine that satisfied individuality, which lay at the root of all progress.

The raison d'etre of the state is that it is an instrument of serving the people. But Gandhi feared that in the name of moulding the state into a suitable instrument of serving people, the state would abrogate the rights of the citizens and arrogate to itself the role of grand protector and demand abject acquiescence from them. This would create a paradoxical situation where the citizens would be alienated from the state and at the same time enslaved to it which according to Gandhi was demoralising and dangerous.

If Gandhi's close acquaintance with the working of the state apparatus in South Africa and in India strengthened his suspicion of a centralized, monolithic state, his intimate association with the congress and its leaders confirmed his fears about the corrupting influence of political power and his skepticism about the efficacy of the party systems of power politics and his study of the British parliamentary systems convinced him of the utter impotency of representative democracy of the Westminster model in meting out justice to people.

So he thought it necessary to evolve a mechanism to achieve the twin objectives of empowering the people and empowering the state. It was for this that he developed the two pronged strategy of resistance to the state and reconstruction through voluntary and participatory social action.

Socio-political developments in the post-colonial world corresponded with the Gandhian prognosis. The post-colonial Indian state started showing signs of becoming authoritarian under the pretext of becoming an adequate instrument of serving the people.

Since erstwhile colonies had to overcome their under- development due to colonial exploitation and develop in order to "catch up with the west", post colonial societies were urged to give their states enormous power in every domain.

As Neera Chandhoke points out, 'development empowered the state in a way no other ideology could, indeed development became ideology. Narrowly conceived in an economist fashion development portrayed the state as an impersonal vehicle of social change. As the post colonial elite who were captains of the state believed that development was the imperative of the time and considered it to be a value free social process, they ignored the crucial fact that such an approach would breed its own patterns of domination and social oppression'.

As pointed out in the beginning the hope of postcolonial transformation in which the state was assigned a pivotal role was completely belied. The state was made visibly pro-elitist, catering to the needs of the rich and the powerful.

With the beginning of the last decade of the century, the post colonial states began openly collaborating with Trans-National and Multi-National Corporations and Companies compromising even the sovereignty of the nation state and exposing the weaker sections of the people to stark exploitation. New forms of Western domination are being facilitated by the market.

In short, the very conception of the state as an instrument of human liberation and social transformation is to be doubted and contested. Not only the state but active mediators of the political process namely the political parties also have alienated themselves from the people and forfeited their credibility. It is not necessary to argue so hard to show that all these trends correspond to the Gandhian prognosis.

In this paradoxical situation, the victims of oppression are compelled to fall back on the legacy of the anti-colonial struggle that challenged the authoritarian conception of the state and political power. The anti-colonial struggles had opened up the streams of democratic consciousness that gave the people not only a sense of their fundamental and inalienable rights but also confidence in their capability to challenge and throw anti-people regimes, through peaceful means.

Another dimension of the anti-colonial struggle was that it gave the people the vision of an ideal social order that is free from exploitation, segregation and domination and also the hope that they can, through corporate effort, translate this vision into reality.

All these have boiled down to a new determination among the massesparticularly the oppressed and the marginalised and the displacedon the one hand to resist all forms of oppressive structures including the state, and on the other to strive for a more humane, participatory, just and sustainable social order.

The socio-political turbulence and upheavals that we witness today are manifestations of this new determination. Most of these groups are composed mainly of sensitised and radicalised middle class youth working with and for the oppressed and exploited strata with a vision to transform society.

Another commentator has identified three major groups of actors in Peoples MovementsGandhians, radical Christians and freelance Marxist intellectuals. Many women's action groups are involved. Struggles of the Dalitsfighting structural and socio-cultural oppressionsmost action groups are Ambedkaritesvery active in Karnataka and Maharashtramost of them not committed to nonviolence.

Demand socio-economic justice and equality. Struggles of the Tribalsthe worst hit victims of major development projects of India like big dams, mines and collieries, thermal power stations, etc. Ecological Strugglesprobably the most popular and widespread are environmental strugglesdemand an end to pollution, environmental degradation, over-exploitation of natural resources, and non-renewable sources of energypose the issues of sustainable development and alternative life styles.

NBA, the most popular movement today. People's Union for Civil Liberties. Anti-Nuclear Campaigns and Strugglesresist the establishment of atomic power plantsthe attempt to establish nuclear reactors were defeated twice in Keralaand the escalation of nuclear weapons and other weapons like missilesthe Baliapal Struggle. Struggles against the liquor, drug menacedemand legal ban on the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcohol, drugs and other intoxicantschiefly under the aegis of All India Prohibition Council and State Prohibition Councilsalso led by citizens and Women's Action Groups prohibition was an item in Gandhi's Constructive Programme.

Struggles for land redistributionmobilising landless agricultural labourers and tillers and other landless sections and offering satyagraha against the state and landlords and certain institutions that are monopoly holders of landcapture and occupation of land the campaigns led by Shri Jagannathan, a senior Sarvodaya leader in Tamil Nadualso similar struggles in Bihar.

Struggles for Gramswarajan ongoing campaign for realising village-self-sufficiency and autonomy through struggles and constructive activitiesled by Sarva Seva Sangh.

Struggles against Commercial Tourismexpose the evil designs of corporate capitalism in promoting tourism as an industry leading to cultural pollution, carnivalisation of religious festivals, child prostitution and large scale environmental destructionactive in states like Goa and Kerala. Citizens make the nation and therefore development of each and every individual leads to the development of the nation. Looking at the economically weaker sections of the society today, it can be seen that there are loopholes in the system which restricts the development of poor people on various aspects like skill development, education, hygiene, healthcare, or other aspects.

The Gandhian philosophy has always been the guiding light for the governments to implement the democracy in India and world-wide in an effective manner. He internalised the poetry of the Bible and developed a unique religious frame in which the Sermon on the Mount could share place with the Gita. What made you truly civilised was your striving and ability to make the other feel equal to you and feel confident to keep her head high in your presence.

London schooled Gandhi in the ideals of hospitality and neighbourliness. A true nation was one where the strangers felt welcome and safe. He welcomed them to live in an independent India as equals. He, one of their subjects rebuked them for being un-Christian and claimed the right to teach them true Christianity without leaving Hinduism. Gandhi felt responsible for the religion he was born into. It was easy to leave it and find a more comfortable abode in some other religion. He could have become a Muslim and a Christian or a Sikh.

But to continue to live with the imperfectness of your religion and constantly fight with it requires a mettle only Gandhi had. His religion had some role in making him and he also had a duty to make it human. So, he imagined a different Hinduism and made it a persuasive case.

We seldom care to think about his insistence that for him Ram was a fictional character, an imagination and Gita a poetic text. He tried to live religion like poetry. Poetry frees the reader and gives her or him the power to interpret. Similarly a nation has to be like a poem, a long unfinished poem. The concept of Vaishnav Jan, one who feels the pain of the other is not a novel idea of Gandhi but to make it a political project to work towards making a nation of such Vaishnav Jan was a unique Gandhian invention.