Comment in 150 words: Gandhi’s Views on State. (2015, 10 Marks)
M. K. Gandhi (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) approached the state as a moralist, not a constitutional theorist. Since ahimsa was his first principle, he judged the modern state by the coercion it rests on, and wanted that coercion reduced as far as human nature allowed.
The Indictment
- Organised violence. In his 1934 conversation with Nirmal Kumar Bose he said the state represents violence in a concentrated and organised form. It is a soulless machine: individuals have consciences and can be persuaded, an apparatus cannot.
- Threat to individuality. Even when it reduces exploitation, an expanding state weakens the self-reliance and moral agency on which progress depends.
- Critique of existing systems. Hind Swaraj (1909) rejected both colonial rule and the Westminster model it would bequeath: English rule without the Englishman was not swaraj.
The Ideal
- Enlightened anarchy. Where social life becomes self-regulated, representation and coercion are unnecessary. Each person rules himself without hindering others, so there is no ruler and no ruled (Young India, 1931). Ramrajya is its Indian name.
- Village republics. In Harijan (July 1946) each village was to be a self-sufficient panchayat republic, able to manage its affairs and even defend itself against the whole world. Authority would spread outward in an oceanic circle, not downward from an apex.
- Foundations. Its pillars would be non-violence, self-reliance (swadeshi, bread labour) and trusteeship of wealth in place of expropriation.
Sources and Qualifications
Part of this hostility came from experience. In South Africa and in India he lived under states that denied accountability to their subjects and governed them by force. It also drew on Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau. He was not a programmatic anarchist, though. He accepted a minimal, decentralised state in the interim, conceded a defensive army and allowed statutory trusteeship if persuasion failed.
Assessment
A democratic state bound by Fundamental Rights is not the colonial state he fought, and B. R. Ambedkar saw in it the only instrument that could free Dalits from village and caste domination. Yet Gandhi’s fear of state power remains relevant. In K. S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) a nine-judge bench recognised privacy as a fundamental right against an expanding, data-driven state.
Conclusion
Gandhi’s view is best read as philosophical anarchism with a practical minimalism. It cannot be applied wholesale to a constitutional democracy, but it keeps the burden of justification on every increase in state power.