Explain Gandhi’s ideas regarding State and highlight their relationship with modern democracy and principles of anarchism. (2006, 60 Marks)
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi offered no theory of sovereignty or institutions. His view of the state is a moral judgement on organised coercion, drawn from ahimsa. It makes him an anarchist in ideal and a decentralising democrat in practice, yet fully neither.
Gandhi’s Ideas on the State
- Nature. In his 1934 conversation with Nirmal Kumar Bose he described the state as violence in concentrated, organised form, a machine without a soul that cannot be weaned from the force that founds it.
- Priority of the individual. Only persons have conscience, so conscience outranks law. Open disobedience of an unjust law, penalty accepted, becomes a duty.
- The ideal. In Young India (1931) he described national life so self-regulated that representation becomes unnecessary: enlightened anarchy, where each rules himself without hindering his neighbour. Since the ideal is never fully realised, he endorsed Henry David Thoreau‘s maxim that the best government governs least. Ramrajya names the same moral order in Indian idiom.
- The transition. Until then he accepted a minimal, non-violent, decentralised state: police as servants rather than masters, a defensive army conceded as inconsistent with the ideal, and trusteeship given statutory form if persuasion failed.
- Structure. Village republics form an oceanic circle of widening, never-ascending circles, not a pyramid.
Relationship with Modern Democracy
A critic of democracy as practised.
- Hind Swaraj (1909) echoed Thomas Carlyle in calling the British Parliament a talking shop steered by party and press.
- In Harijan (1940) he called Western democracy, as it functions today, diluted Nazism or Fascism, because it rested on violence and exploitation.
A radical democrat in principle.
- My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest should have the same opportunity as the strongest, which only non-violence can secure.
- True democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the centre (Harijan, 1948). It must work from each village.
- In matters of conscience the law of majority has no place (1920). This anticipates liberal limits on majorities.
His model resembles participatory democracy as later theorised by Carole Pateman (1970). It survives in Article 40, the 73rd Amendment’s Gram Sabha and PESA (1996). The farmers’ year-long, largely non-violent protest that ended with the repeal of the three farm laws (November 2021) showed satyagraha-style pressure within democracy. Yet Amit Sahni (2020) held that dissent cannot mean occupying public space indefinitely, as B. R. Ambedkar‘s warning against the grammar of anarchy (1949) had anticipated.
Relationship with Anarchism
He shares anarchism’s view of the state as coercion and Peter Kropotkin‘s preference for federated, self-governing communes. Leo Tolstoy‘s The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) was his acknowledged source. The differences are decisive:
| Criterion | Classical anarchism | Gandhi |
|---|---|---|
| Objection to the state | Illegitimate authority | Institutionalised violence |
| Method | Revolt, general strike, sometimes the deed | Satyagraha only |
| Property | Abolished or collectivised | Held in trust |
| Religion | Often hostile | The ground of the argument |
| Pace | Rupture | Gradual withdrawal of state functions |
His anarchism is philosophical, not programmatic: a horizon placing the burden of proof on every extension of state power. Karuna Mantena relates his anti-statism to the pluralist attack on sovereignty (Harold Laski, George Douglas Howard Cole) more than to classical anarchism.
Limits
- Ambedkar saw society, not the state, as the main oppressor, and made the state the instrument of emancipation.
- A welfare state and national defence need the coercive capacity Gandhi distrusted; his heirs built a planning state.
Conclusion
Gandhi’s state theory is anarchist in aspiration and democratic in method. Rejecting the centralised state that liberal democracy took for granted, it leaves a test: power is legitimate to the extent it is decentralised, consensual and non-violent.