A theory of political power has persistently and increasingly held sway in both our diagnoses and solutions to problems in the modern nation state. The common thread that binds both the nature of people’s dissent and demands and the method of the state is a belief in political power. Ironically therefore, the explanation for all social evils – hegemony of class, caste and state, is provided by the same theory of power that fuels the system from which we seek redressal. Gandhi saw that within this framework, the state and its citizens, perpetrators and victims, are bound in a single and necessary system of power that empowers and disempowers, while each places, replaces and displaces the other in a tireless unending game of musical chairs, as it were. His ‘constructive programme’ for poorna swaraj was quite simply conceived to render this structure of power and empowerment redundant. Quite apart from Gandhi’s commitment to truth and non-violence, this is brilliantly sound political theory, and he knew it to be so.

Gandhi first composed and wrote his short pamphlet, ‘Constructive Programme’ in 1941¹ which, by his own admission, comprised an illustrative, not comprehensive, list of issues that needed serious attention for swaraj to become possible. Swaraj brought sovereignty, and not power, centre-stage. ‘Poorna Swaraj’ would be achieved only when every unit, including the humblest, of the nation became sovereign, i.e. had the resources – moral, spiritual, economic and physical – to rule itself. The constructive programme was a necessary condition for civil disobedience. Gandhi’s analogy to explain the role of the constructive programme is both significant and instructive: Just as soldiers are trained for armed revolt in the use of arms, people are trained for civil disobedience by the constructive programme.

 

This brings out the fundamental difference between the paradigms of power and of sovereignty. Since the former presupposes enforcement, it is based on principles of violence and must therefore maintain military preparedness; the latter precludes any imposition or enforcement on the other and is therefore necessarily non-violent. However, he is well aware of the trap that one could easily fall into by believing that the ‘enemy’ is only one who imposes from without. Centralization of the constructive programme by any government, foreign or native, would be an imposition and hence a threat to people’s sovereignty. Constructive workers must ‘hold themselves in readiness if the constructive effort is sought to be defeated.’ By the same logic, Gandhi argues that civil disobedience must never be directed toward a general cause such as independence but must have as its target a specific issue such as, for instance, in the case of the Dandi march, the salt laws.

For those in doubt as to whether Gandhi really means to separate the sovereignty of the people from that of the nation state, one may remind ourselves of Gandhi’s scathing indictment of parliamentary democracy in Hind Swaraj.² In the ‘Constructive Programme’, he again reiterates the tyranny of the illusion that legislative assemblies bestow power on the people; in other words, the illusion that they are truly representative of the power of the people: ‘Civil disobedience is the storehouse of power. Imagine a whole people unwilling to conform to the laws of the legislature, and prepared to suffer the consequences of non-compliance! They will bring the whole legislative and executive machinery to a standstill.’³

The recent people’s uprising led by Anna Hazare and later by Arvind Kejriwal has raised the question in many people’s minds as to what the relation between the Parliament and the dissenting people/civil society is. Did they have the right to protest against duly elected representatives of the people? Was civil society represented by Parliament or the protesting crowd? Was it unconstitutional for them to protest? This would indeed be so if one believed, as liberal political theory, on which the modern nation state is founded, posits, that civil society comes into being and is sustained only by the establishment of the state.⁴ However, the state is founded in a principle of conformity of people’s wills and is therefore necessarily premised on the possibility of enforcement. As Gandhi is quick to point out, parliamentary procedure ‘is fairly effective only among compatibles.’

 

He was therefore rightly cynical of political pacts under the parliamentary system whether in the case of the Hindu-Muslim issue which was based on a forced or ‘artificial unity’ or, on the other hand, separate electorates for the depressed classes which was based on forced or ‘artificial incompatibles.’ Such legislative procedure would not only fail to forge any true unity amongst the people but would be both potentially and actually destructive of any constructive programme, and therefore the possibility of swaraj of all groups concerned.

 

It is possible to argue in the context of the methodology of civil disobedience that the Anna movement was not supported by a constructive programme and therefore had to die a natural death. Whether the AAP can sustain itself and offers a constructive programme only time can tell. Its dilemma in parliamentary office is clearly one of how to continue to affirm people’s power in civil disobedience even as it finds itself in the position of the state. In this, it is confronted with an experiment that Gandhi had left untried. Nevertheless, one may say that erratic and disruptive as it may seem, the forays that AAP made on the streets and in attempted referendums during their tenure were indicative that they had not lost sight of the basic principle of swaraj, that sovereignty rests with the people and not in the state, however representative it may claim to be. Whether one should be as cynical of the Lokpal bill as Gandhi was of political pacts made by Parliament is a question that remains to be answered.

The opposition to the theory of political power was enough reason for Gandhi to make enemies of all those who had a stake in independent India. The Congress was the first to dissociate itself from Gandhi. Jinnah, with the Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha and Ambedkar were not far behind. Common to each one of them was a belief that political power was the solution to all problems, offering at least, the only practical solution. The Congress wanted to establish a sovereign state and a constitution which made it clear that peace, not non-violence nor truth was its goal. Jinnah and the Hindu Mahasabha each had their own dream of a heady mix of religion and political power, the one in establishing Pakistan as a ‘pure’ Islamic state and the latter in affirming India as a Hindu state. Ambedkar was clear that he wanted political power for the depressed classes. He did not care much for the Harijan Sewak Samaj’s constructive work amongst the depressed classes, arguing that it merely duplicated work that the state was already doing. Further, he felt that Gandhi would serve the cause better if he focused on their problems (i.e. of the depressed classes) rather than consider national interests as well:

A. But I have only one quarrel with you, that is, you work for the so-called national welfare and not for our interests alone. If you devoted yourself entirely to the welfare of the Depressed Classes, you would then become our hero.

G. Very sweet of you to say so.

A. I want political power for my community. That is indispensable for our survival. The basis of the agreement therefore should be: I should get what is due to me. I wish to tell the Hindus that I should be assured of my compensation.

(Discussion with B.R. Ambedkar, 22 September 1932⁵)

 

In the theory of rights there is a longstanding debate on the question of the status of natural and legal rights. The problem, it is felt is that while rights may be natural and inalienable, in the absence of an enforcing mechanism they would remain at best an empty right. On the other hand, a legal right presupposes that a right may be introduced and withdrawn by the state at will. Therefore, even though a right may need legal reinforcement, it is ultimately inalienable, i.e. a right is not conferred but is a defining quality of personhood. It is further argued that to base the strength of a right on the strength of a law affirmed by contract or a statute of the state is to weaken rather than strengthen its foundations. On the other hand, to disconnect a right’s dependence on state enforcement implies that the only meaningful and compelling option left is affirmation and persuasion to recognize the inalienable, mutual and equal rights of all members of a society.

 

In effect, then, one cannot lose an inalienable right even if one may have signed it away at some time. In fact, Gandhi’s thesis was that it was not the British that had taken India and, therefore, our rights away from us, we had indeed chosen to hand it over to them ourselves. The point here is not to discount the circumstances that led to the subjugation of India nor, for that matter, to condone them, but to emphasize the inalienability of the right to sovereignty of every member of the nation. From this point of view then to regain one’s sovereignty would require primarily and fundamentally an act of affirmation on one’s part.

Neither self-affirmation on the part of a person, community or nation nor the reciprocal recognition and acknowledgement by the other in each case comes easily and most often it is an arduous and painful process involving great suffering and sacrifice. However, it is the non-violent negotiation of this affirmation and reciprocal recognition amongst persons, communities and nations without the enforcement of any external authority of state or religion, which is constitutive of civil society. It must in principle be non-violent since it cannot be enforced. For it to be enforced would contradict the very principle of the sovereignty of all that is the condition sought to be established.

The subjects included in the constructive programme for India’s independence were directed towards what Gandhi meant by it: swaraj for every unit of society – person, community, village and nation. Though Gandhi claims that there is no particular order of priority in the list, one may argue that there is an order in terms of the more fundamental and comprehensive of subjects with respect to the requirements of swaraj for the nation and the less comprehensive, which rest in relation to each other as in the case of concentric circles, the less comprehensive being encompassed by the more comprehensive, and each being constitutive of the other. Therefore, for instance, communal unity comes first in the list, followed only by the removal of untouchability since, without them, it would be impossible, by definition, for India to realize true swaraj.

 

As Gandhi points out in the introduction, Amery’s⁶ condition that all political parties must agree before India’s demand for freedom is heard, translates for him into ‘any agreement after communal unity’, which he adds ‘is only one item (among others) in the constructive programme.’ Again, a reminder and reiteration that independence could not be had by political power nor unity by political pacts but only by the process within civil society, however slow and difficult it may seem, of negotiating difference through social reform and, in Gandhi’s seemingly quaint words, ‘unbreakable heart unity’ invoking in our vocabulary, the theory of inalienable sovereignty and rights of persons who constitute civil society.

The miscellaneous list covers almost every difference that requires negotiation and inclusion within civil society, whether it is between Hindus and Muslims, upper castes and depressed castes, men and women, young and old, capital and labour, adivasis and lepers. It then lists institutions of work, education, health, hygiene and sanitation, language and political economy that would form the bedrock of unity which makes for the health and well being of the body and body politic.

 

The constructive programme was Gandhi’s method for the regeneration of swaraj for each and every unit of society irrespective of caste, creed or race and therefore a constitutive and necessary part of the civil disobedience movement. He is conscious that it is a document that would be mistaken to contain the political agenda of the Congress party and is therefore at pains to clarify that ‘it is not a thesis written on behalf of the Congress or at the instance of the Central office’ but with the express intent of enabling understanding of ‘the connection between the constructive programme and Civil Disobedience.’⁷ Seen in the context of political theory and method, this was a programme meant to unsettle the ‘inertia or hypnotism’ that makes people believe in a theory of power,⁸ an illusion that Liberal theory continues to sell, with single-minded devotion, to the modern world.

Thus the critical issue and fundamental debate is between those who are of the view that sovereignty is an inalienable quality of the state and those who are of the view that it is an inalienable quality of persons and civil society. It is this question that defines the fundamental difference of approach to the problem of untouchability and the caste system between Gandhi and Ambedkar. For Gandhi the self-affirmation of the depressed castes and the reciprocal atonement of those belonging to the Hindu upper castes for their sins of untouchability, combined with their acknowledgement of the rights of personhood and sovereignty of the depressed classes, alone presented the possibility of a lasting solution to the problem of untouchability. That alone could break the truck between power and empowerment and perpetrator and victim.

Ambedkar, as we have seen, wanted political power for the depressed classes. Contravening the very laws that govern civil society, the manipulative game of power and empowerment, perpetrator and victim has been played and replayed with an inevitability that followed from the very rules that govern the game of political power, regardless of the nobility or ignobility of the players and the powers that be. The same can be said of the way Indo-Pakistan relations have played out and the policies that determine the functioning of Indian parliamentary democracy.

 

Surprisingly, those who take an anti-state stand and argue for people’s rights to self-determination without interference from the state take an exactly opposing stand when it comes to the issue of caste. They argue that state laws, political power and enforcement are required for the self-affirmation of the depressed classes. The tirade against Gandhi in Arundhati Roy’s introduction to the recently reprinted Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste is only the most recent example.⁹ What is unfortunate is that we are as yet unable to step back and critique in terms of theory, method and principles, and rest satisfied with personality slugfests. As Gandhi had warned, there are miles to go before swaraj!

 

* Anuradha Veeravalli is the author of Gandhi in Political Theory: Truth, Law and Experiment. Ashgate, U.K., 2014.

Footnotes:

1. M.K. Gandhi, Constructive Programme: Its Meaning and Place. The Navajivan Trust, Ahmedabad, 1941.

2. M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj. The Navajivan Trust, Ahmedabad, 1938.

3. M.K. Gandhi, op. cit., 1941, p. 9.

4. For a detailed discussion on this aspect see Anuradha Veeravalli, ‘Swaraj and Sovereignty’, Economic and Political Weekly XLVI(5), 29 January 2011, pp. 65-69.

5. M.K. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Publications Division, Government of India, New Delhi (Vol. 57, Appendix 1B), 1999. The version used here is the electronic book (98 volumes) downloadable from: http://www.gandhiserve. org/e/cwmg/cwmg.htm. (Accessed: 14 January 2014)

6. Secretary of State for India in the British government.

7. M.K. Gandhi, op. cit., 1941, p. 30.

8. Ibid., p. 8.

9. Arundhati Roy, Excerpt from The Doctor and the Saint, The Caravan 6(3), March 2014.