“State ………. does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of all progress.” — Mahatma Gandhi. Elucidate. (2025, 15 Marks)
The line comes from Mahatma Gandhi‘s interview with the anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose (9–10 November 1934), published in The Modern Review in 1935. In full, Gandhi said he looked on any increase in the power of the State with the greatest fear: while apparently doing good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm by destroying individuality. The claim distils his philosophical anarchism.
The Argument
- State as organised violence. In the same interview Gandhi described the State as violence in a concentrated and organized form: the individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence. A person can be persuaded; an apparatus cannot.
- Individuality as moral agency. For Gandhi, individuality meant the capacity to govern oneself by conscience. Hind Swaraj (1909) put it plainly: It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. Progress meant moral growth, not material accumulation.
- How the state destroys it. The state externalises authority. As citizens come to rely on it for welfare, security and decisions, they become passive subjects instead of responsible agents. Even benevolent centralisation, including socialist nationalisation, weakens the self-reliance on which reform depends.
- The ideal. In Young India (2 July 1931) Gandhi described enlightened anarchy, a condition in which everyone is his own ruler, and endorsed Henry David Thoreau‘s maxim that that government is best which governs the least.
- The alternatives. He preferred trusteeship to state ownership, telling Bose that he wanted an extension of the sense of trusteeship rather than a centralisation of power in the State. Beyond that he proposed village republics linked in an oceanic circle, and satyagraha in place of coercion.
Evaluation
- Gandhi’s own concessions. In the same interview he accepted that owners who failed as trustees might be dispossessed through the State with the minimum exercise of violence. Enlightened anarchy was a horizon, not a programme.
- B. R. Ambedkar reversed the diagnosis. For him, society, through caste, oppressed more than the state did, and he called the village a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism. The rights-enforcing state was the Dalit’s protector.
- Welfare and development. Jawaharlal Nehru and the planners held that mass poverty required a strong state. Decentralisation can also entrench local elites.
- Vindication. The totalitarian states of the 1930s bore out Gandhi’s fear. Karuna Mantena places him among the pluralist critics of sovereignty.
Indian Relevance
The Constitution absorbed Gandhi selectively. Article 40 directs the state to organise village panchayats, and the 73rd Amendment (1992) made them a constitutional tier. Over 14 lakh women now hold elected panchayat office. Yet uneven devolution of funds, functions and functionaries leaves panchayats implementing rather than deciding, the centralising pull Gandhi feared.
Conclusion
Gandhi’s claim is a standard, not a blueprint: it puts the burden of justification on every increase of state power. India’s constitutional answer combines Ambedkar’s rights-protecting state with Gandhi’s decentralised self-rule, and it remains unfinished.