THE phrase ‘The Smallest Army Imaginable’ is a quote from Gandhi. In 1931, when Gandhi was en route to the Round Table Conference in London, a reporter asked him, ‘What is your programme?’ He responded by writing out a short statement called The India of My Dreams, now quite famous. He said the India of his dreams would be an India that is free, belongs to its people, has no high or low classes, no discrimination against women, no intoxicating substances and ‘the smallest army imaginable’. It is very easy to imagine zero. But if you ask people, what is the smallest army imaginable, they will be puzzled. Of course, the smallest army imaginable is no army at all, but this is very diffcult to imagine. Why this is so is a puzzle.

There is, however, one place where the smallest army imaginable has been eloquently imagined. That is in Article 9 of the post-war Constitution of Japan. Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, adopted while the Constituent Assembly of India was in session, reads as follows:

‘Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of a nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.

‘In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea and air forces as well as any other war potential will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of state will not be recognised.’

It is true that this clause of the Japanese Constitution has not been obeyed by the Japanese government. It has not been enforced as it is written here. But as a statement of the smallest military imaginable, i.e., no military at all, it is, I believe, as clear and eloquent as words can achieve. I would like, in particular, to draw your attention to the last sentence: The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognised.

What is the right of belligerency of the state? This is not an expression that comes often to our lips. It does not mean the right to invade other countries, or the right to expand territory. The right of belligerency of the state is the essential right of the state to make war at all. The best way to understand it is to state it in blunt language. The right to belligerency of the state is the right that allows soldiers to kill and maim people and destroy property without being arrested for murder and mayhem.

If they are not soldiers, if they do it as ordinary civilians, they are called murderers or serial killers or terrorists. If they are soldiers, they are not held responsible. The killing under this right is not considered to be murder in two senses: legally, it is not considered to be murder – the people are not arrested – and morally, ethically, socially, it is not considered to be murder – the people are not cast out from society. Soldiers are not expected to feel guilty about the people they have killed; in fact they often do but are not supposed to. They are supposed to be proud and get medals for doing it.

 

In mainstream political science, this right of belligerency is the very essence of the state. Max Weber, the German sociologist, writing a hundred years ago, gave this as the definition of the state – ‘A state is that social organisation which claims a right of legitimate violence.’ The right of belligerency is one part of the right of legitimate violence. To deny a state the right of belligerency seems to deny the state its very reason for existence, to deny the state altogether. And yet that is what the Japanese Constitution does say, and that is what I think is implied by Gandhi’s expression ‘the smallest army imaginable’

Now, against this background, within the context of this definition, I would like to talk about Gandhi.

 

And in doing so, I would like to take as my text The Prince and The Discourses on Livy by Machiavelli. I choose Machiavelli for two reasons – one, to protect myself as much as possible from the accusation that I am a political scientist who knows nothing of political realism and am talking only about dreams and fantasies: Machiavelli is the great representative of, or is believed to be the great representative of, political realism. The second is that Machiavelli is the premier theorist, at least in the West, on the subject of founding and reforming states.

Machiavelli’s reputation popularly is simply as the man who said the end justifies the means. But his theory is primarily focused on the founding of states and his key hypothesis is that the founding of a state must be under the leadership of one man. New states tend to be founded under the leadership of one man, the prince or, as he would be called in the twentieth century after Max Weber, the charismatic leader. To found a state, according to Machiavelli, it is simply inescapable that this prince must commit horrible crimes, be dishonest, use violence; it can’t be done any other way. Machiavelli did not use the word ‘charisma’ but the notion is implied in what he meant by ‘prince’.

If you think in this way, then the twentieth century is Machiavelli’s century. In the twentieth century 138 new sovereign states were founded and many of them, perhaps not all, have attached to them the name of this Machiavellian prince-like figure. Think of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, of Lenin, Nasser, U Nu, Sukarno, Jomo Kenyata, Leopold Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah, Mao-tse-Tung, Ho-chi-Minh, Tito, Kim il Sung, Castro – the list goes on and on. These are a few of the more well-known figures, and on that list when we come to India, the name of course is Gandhi. But something goes wrong because all the other figures seem in one way or another to fit Machiavelli’s image of the prince, while somehow Gandhi doesn’t seem at home here. To bring this difference into focus, I would like to use one passage from Machiavelli’s The Discourses on Livy.

‘And as the reformation of political condition of a state presupposes a good man whist the making of himself a prince of a republic by violence naturally presupposes a bad one, it will consequently be exceedingly rare that a good man should be found willing to employ wicked means to become prince, even though his final object be good; or that a bad man, after having become prince, should be willing to labor for good ends, and that it should enter his mind to use for good purposes that authority which he has acquired by evil means.’

 

To become prince, you have to do evil things. But to found a republic, you need a good heart. How do you find a person with a good heart willing to do the evil things, or why should a person willing to do the evil things suddenly have a good heart after the founding has been achieved? Look at the list of charismatic leaders who led state foundings in the twentieth century: in all those cases, much has been written about how well and how badly they struggled with this dilemma. But again, in the case of Gandhi, it doesn’t seem to fit; Gandhi’s rejection of Machiavelli is virtually total. This doesn’t mean that he escapes the dilemma; it means the dilemma returns to him standing on its head. That is, Gandhi invented a way of bringing the state to the point of its founding without doing the evil things that Machiavelli believed inescapable. He invented or discovered – or he created by the force of his will – a different way of founding a state.

So the dilemma returns, topsy-turvy. When a person has brought a state to the point of founding using only good means, how does he persuade himself to become the head of state when the state means the violent state, the state that claims the right of legitimate violence? It seems Gandhi could not. The Father of the Nation could not become the Father of the State, its prince. When the movement shifted from the liberation to state-building, as everyone knows, Gandhi backed off. He took no post. He had no position. He was not prince or president or prime minister. He was not a member of the Constituent Assembly. He, however, continued to advise his friends who were running the government. Of course, sometimes his advice was less than welcome.

 

And at the same time, long before then and even as the Constituent Assembly was going on, Gandhi was proposing a completely different constitution for India. In his own writings, unfortunately, Gandhi never put together a systematic statement of what his constitution for India was. But one of his disciples, Shriman Narayan Agarwal did. With Gandhi’s approval, he produced a book called Gandhian Constitution for Free India which was published as the Constituent Assembly was going on. It is quite remarkable that while Thomas More’s Utopia, William Morris’s News from Nowhere or Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, among other books making utopian proposals, have never been out of print and are often assigned to college students everywhere in undergraduate courses, this book has been out of print for years. It seems that it is not being given the attention that it deserves – maybe because it is a little bit threatening.

 

The key, as I understand it, to Gandhi’s proposal for a constitution for India is in the single sentence: ‘Every village will become a republic or panchayat.’ It is difficult to take this sentence seriously and many commentators do not. In many learned commentaries on Gandhi the word ‘republic’ is replaced by ‘community’ or ‘local government organisation’ or some such. But the word Gandhi used is republic and republic has a very clear meaning. It means a sovereign political entity. Each village becomes a sovereign political entity.

Well, if you think about it that sounds like a very disreputable idea. Does it mean that seven hundred thousand new states are suddenly founded? That the number of states in the world at that time is expanded from 76 to 7,00076? If each of these states then sent a representative to the United Nations that would have, by my calculation, increased the population of New York City by 10%. But I don’t think Gandhi meant this as a plan to pack the UN. The plan provides for elective representatives and higher tiers of representative bodies finally culminating in something called an All-India Panchayat. But, according to Agarwal, these higher tiers have only advisory powers, something like the League of Nations or the United Nations. They do not have sovereignty, they can only advise. That means, sovereignty is at the bottom.

The idea of popular sovereignty is supposed to be one of the great principles of modern political theory. But, in most countries it at best means an election every few years where you can vote for or against somebody. Gandhi’s proposal takes popular sovereignty seriously. It puts sovereignty concretely in each village. So this is an interesting proposal from the standpoint of a political theory. But, the question I want to ask is: Would this All-India Panchayat at the top have a military arm? Agarwal himself is vague on this question. He talks about national defence, but not of the means of national defence.

The matter, however, is decided very quickly if you think of it another way. If you have 700000 sovereign entities, it would not be possible either to raise or to command an army. The central authority has only advisory powers, not the power of command. But a military is based on the principle of command. It has to have behind it a sovereign power. Without that, it cannot carry out coordinated and sustained military action.

 

In a certain way, Gandhi’s constitutional proposal stands as a kind of complement to the Japanese Constitution. The Japanese Constitution has a clear statement of the non-military option. But the state structure is an ordinary state structure, which longs for military power. This is one reason why the Japanese government has for long been trying to amend the constitution and get for itself military power ever since. Gandhi’s constitution doesn’t have a clear non-military statement, but structurally it could not produce military power. Further, Gandhi also said that the members of each of these seven hundred thousand panchayats would be trained in satyagraha. Now, who would be so foolish as to invade a country that has seven hundred thousand fiercely resisting political entities? If such a country were actually founded it would be unconquerable.

But unfortunately – some would say fortunately – such a state was not founded. Something very different happened. So we should stop talking about what could have happened and talk about what did happen. What did happen was that the Congress and the Muslim League both opted for a modern state with military power, the modern, armed, powerful, centralised state which resulted in partition, turned out to be two states and, of course, terrible nightmarish communal violence and bloodshed, at which point Gandhi began speaking about his death. Famously, he said to Patel, ‘What sin have I committed that He should have kept me alive to witness these horrors?’

 

The last thing I would like to talk about, also a Machiavellian theme, is the theme of founding and sacrifice. The dictionary defines sacrifice as, ‘The slaughter of an animal or a person, often including the subsequent consumption of it by fire, as an offering to a God or a deity.’ Many people have noticed that there is something strange about the assassination of Gandhi. It has been pointed out that the police had plenty of information. A bomb was exploded ten days before the assassination by a member of the conspiracy group, and the bomber was captured and he talked. But somehow, mysteriously, the police, the Home Ministry and others became lethargic and were not able to move.

But even earlier, Gandhi’s death had become a subject of public talk. People who were angry at the stand he was taking on partition shouted, ‘Death to Gandhi!’ During his fasts to death, people would shout, ‘Let Gandhi die!’ And he himself talked compulsively about dying, about taking bullets in his bare chest, whether he would or would not say ‘Hey Ram’ when bullets entered his chest. Not only that, but by his fasts to death, he forced his death on the public’s attention by making it a public issue. Whether Gandhi would or would not die depended on what policy the government would take or what action the public would take. His death became a counter in a game of power.

Ashis Nandy has written a brilliant essay on this subject in which he argues that the assassin, Nathuram Godse, was not a fanatic or a marginal person, but a rational, thoughtful and even courageous person who was a representative not of the margins of society but of mainstream modernising Indian society. Gandhi’s challenge to the deep structure of that society had made many people consciously or unconsciously angry with him or frustrated with him. Nandy writes about mainstream middle class modernising Indian society: ‘If not their conscious minds, their primitive minds, their primitive selves were demanding his blood.’ There is a way in which – of course, this is not a conspiracy theory, this is a mass psychology – Godse acted as the representative of this widespread feeling.

 

I have no quarrel with this thesis except to say that there is something it fails to explain, and that is the timing of Gandhi’s assassination. That is, if there was a contradiction between Gandhi’s thought and mainstream Hindu thinking, this would have dated back to the 1930s or even to the 1920s. There is no particular reason to choose this moment as the moment of crisis. But if there was a contradiction between the fundamental beliefs of the ‘Founder of the Nation’ and the fundamental philosophy under which state building was going on, then the fact that he was assassinated at the moment the state was being built becomes significant. This is a crisis: the contradiction between the ‘founder of the nation’ and the emerging state would be a crisis that would require radical solution. Once again, I turn to Machiavelli. How would Machiavelli read this situation?

 

Machiavelli believed that the founding of a state not only required a powerful leader, it also required a blood sacrifice. He expressed this most clearly in his story of the founding of the Roman Republic by the man called Brutus. This is not the Brutus who assassinated Julius Caesar. This is an earlier Brutus who threw out the royal family and transformed Rome from a kingdom to a republic. Brutus’s sons went to the royal family and engaged in a conspiracy to bring them back and make Rome again into a monarchy. They were captured and Brutus, now head of state, watched over their execution. The historian Livy describes his face as wavering between the stern face of the head of state and the agonised face of the father of these two boys. Machiavelli writes that Brutus’s sternness was absolutely necessary.

‘Every student of ancient history well knows that any change of government, be it from a republic to a tyranny or from a tyranny to a republic must necessarily be followed by some terrible punishment of the enemies of the existing state of things. And whoever makes himself tyrant of a state and does not kill Brutus, or whoever restores liberty to a state and does not immolate his sons, will not maintain himself in his position long.’

The founding of the state requires, Machiavelli says, blood, the more intimate the better. He chooses the story of the father-Prince killing his sons whom he loves. This drives home into the public consciousness just what the state is. The state is a violent organisation. It will use violence to defend itself. It will make no exception: if the person to be sacrificed is your relative or your friend, this must not matter. It is not enough simply to explain this in words. You can only drive this message into the public consciousness through the real experience of sacrifice.

 

Now, it is true that Nathuram Godse was not an agent of the state. He was not a hired killer. In fact he was tried and punished by the state. But he saw himself as acting on behalf of the state. In his eloquent statement before the court, he said: I did understand and I do understand that by assassinating Gandhi, I am destroying myself. I will be executed for it, which is good and proper. Also most people will hate me for doing what I did, I know that. But, because I did this, because he is gone, India can now become ‘practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces.’

How would Machiavelli have read this story had he lived to see the incident? Would he not have added a corollary to his law derived from the case of Brutus? In the case of Brutus he says, if you want to found a republic, you must kill the sons of Brutus and if you want to found a tyranny, you must kill Brutus. For the Indian case I think he would have added a corollary: If you wish to found a violent state, you must kill Gandhi.

Now, by violent state, I do not mean a fascist state or a military state or an aggressive state or a rogue state or anything like that. By a violent state, I mean a perfectly ordinary state in the modern sense of an ordinary state – a state that has a monopoly of legitimate violence, like almost all states do. I also understand that it is dubious social science to make a general law from a single instance. There is only one instance that we know of. But, of course, there is an explanation for that as well. No other state has had a Gandhi to kill. Only India. So this is the only place where the hypothesis has been tested.

Let me end with two postscripts. In his biography of Gandhi, Robert Payne writes that it was a historical irony and very strange that Gandhi’s funeral arrangements were handed over to the military. He describes the preparations. Gandhi’s body was placed on a weapon’s carrier. It was pulled by two hundred soldiers and sailors and airmen. Four thousand soldiers were to march in front and behind, one thousand airmen, one thousand police and a hundred sailors. Payne writes that many people thought all this was inappropriate. Whether it was appropriate or not depends on how you understand this ceremony. I believe that Nathuram Godse, when he heard of these arrangements, must have thought they were appropriate beyond his wildest dreams.

 

Postscript two is little bit off the wall. George Bernard Shaw wrote a marvellous play about Joan of Arc, Saint Joan, Joan of Arc being the one female charismatic leader that we know of, who was also burned at the end of her life. In the postscript of the play, Joan appears in the dream of King Charles, who she had crowned. One by one there enter into this dream the people who had burned her, the people who had accused her, people who had judged her and the friends who did not try to save her. All bow down to her and say: Joan, we were wrong. You were great. You were the best. We never should have done it. We were absolutely mistaken and we worship you. And she says: Well then lads, I am a saint now, and that means I can do miracles. Shall I come back to you as a living woman? At this point, they all say: Well we weren’t exactly thinking of it in that way. And one by one, they slink out of the room.

 

* Abridged version of the Annual Kothari Chair Lecture, ‘State’s Right to Belligerency and Gandhi on Non Violence’, delivered at CSDS on 18 October 2005.