DEMOCRACY was not Gandhi’s primary concern. His faith in parliamentary democracy was at best limited. He was given to granting himself decisive powers to the extent that he did not hesitate to use terms such as ‘dictatorial power’. This was true not only with regard to the ashram community but also the affairs of the Congress. He liked to keep himself outside the electoral mode, and yet sought to influence the outcome of such exercises to what he desired. He was a leader of the people like none else before and since; he fearlessly walked into the crowds of people touching them and being touched by them. And yet, he had a visceral revulsion to the mob, the unruly, undisciplined crowds that came either for his darshan or to participate in his movements. He was deeply imbued with the ideas of equality, justice and brotherhood, but did not necessarily see these as gifts of the modern world; for him they were essential to human existence since the beginning of human civilizations.

Gandhi liked to think of himself as a democrat, not of an ordinary kind but as an exemplar. He wrote, ‘I claim to be the greatest democrat of modern times. My faith is built upon non-violence and hence I have faith in human nature.’¹ We can come to the first claim later, challenge it or even discard it. It is the second part of the claim that is interesting. Gandhi’s claim, his understanding of the constitutive ground of modern democracy rests on non-violence and faith in human nature.

 

Gandhi’s primary concern was Freedom. Freedom from bondage of course, but something more fundamental. Freedom from desire, freedom from need to sin, freedom from the instinctive lie, freedom from fear, from violence and, in so doing, freedom from rebirth and perhaps freedom even from the desire for moksha. Such a practice of freedom was at the root of his striving for swaraj, both as self-rule and rule over the self. It constituted for him the domain of brahmacharya, conduct that leads one to Truth.

Ahimsa or the practice of love was central to this striving. Ahimsa is not only a practice of non-killing, non-injury. Ahimsa as love is karuna, caritas. It is also that which is inextricable from truth, but more attainable as a means to truth. Ahmisa along with satya are the forces which make life, human life, possible. In the absence of ahimsa and satya, the human vocation of swaraj would remain unattainable. Swaraj in some measure is constituted by democracy or the rule of the people, but democracy for Gandhi does not exhaust the possibilities of swaraj or even self-rule.

It is swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. This aspect of self-rule requires submission to the moral. Self-rule is a capacity that is attained, garnered through the practice of submission. Wilfulness is contrary to the striving for self-rule. Wilfulness for Gandhi was that instinct which leads, to use a term from the Gita, to wrath. Wrath leads to violence and violence to forgetting, forgetting the human vocation because the more we take to violence the more we recede from the self, from truth. The greater the distance from truth and self, the more restricted the possibility of self-knowledge and hence, swaraj become. This surrender required subjugation of human will, of individual autonomy. It is when a person loses autonomy that conscience emerges. Conscience is an act of obedience, not wilfulness.

He said: ‘Wilfulness is not conscience…Conscience is the ripe fruit of strictest discipline… Conscience can reside only in a delicately tuned breast.’² He knew what a person with conscience could be like. ‘A conscientious man hesitates to assert himself, he is always humble, never boisterous, always compromising, always ready to listen, ever willing, even anxious to admit mistakes.’³ A person without this tender breast delicately tuned to the working of the conscience cannot hear the inner voice, or more dangerously, may in fact hear the voice of ego. This capacity did not belong to everyone as a natural gift or a right available in equal measure. What one required was a cultivated capacity to discern the inner voice as distinct from the voice of the ego as, ‘one cannot always recognize whether it is the voice of Rama or Ravana.’⁴

 

True civilization on the other hand was rooted in this very possibility. He wrote: ‘Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and passions. So doing, we know ourselves.’⁵ This act of knowing oneself is not only the basis of spiritual life but also of political life. This act of ruling oneself meant the control of mind and passions, of observance of morality and of knowing the right and the true path. Gandhi’s idea and practice of satyagraha with its invocation of the soul-force is based on this. Satyagraha requires not only the purity of means and ends but also the purity of the practitioner. Satyagraha in the final instance is based on the recognition of one’s own conscience, on one’s ability to listen to one’s inner voice and submit to it.

 

For Gandhi, the capacity to hear the inner voice or the voice of conscience speaking from within and then to submit to its commands is a necessity for his own practice of brahmacharya, his striving to be in the presence of Truth as god and to cultivate perfect ahimsa. Perfect ahimsa for him is a state that is attainable while still being in the mortal frame of the human body, while perfect truth and complete sinlessness are likely to elude the embodied beings. The capacity to hear the inner voice for Gandhi was the closest that he would come to God. Although Gandhi never claimed to have seen God face to face, he could imagine that state: ‘One who has realized God is freed from sin forever. He has no desire to be fulfilled. Not even in his thoughts will he suffer from faults, imperfections or impurities. Whatever he does will be perfect because he does nothing himself but the God within him does everything. He is completely merged in Him.’⁶ This state was for Gandhi the state of perfect self-realization, of perfect self-knowledge.

This submission, this surrender goes against reason. Gandhi was not willing to submit himself to an examination of reason. He wrote in a letter: ‘Of course, for me personally it transcends reason, because I feel it to be a clear will from God. My position is that there is nothing just now that I am doing of my own accord. He guides me from moment to moment.’⁷

 

Prayer was an expression of the definitive and conscious longing of the soul; it was his act of waiting upon Him for guidance. Only a heart purified and cleansed by prayer could be filled with the presence of God. He knew that only when a person lives constantly in the sight of God, when he or she regards each thought with God as witness and its Master, could one feel Rama dwelling in the heart every moment. Such a prayer could only be offered in the spirit of non-attachment, anasakti. Moreover, when the God that he sought to realize is truth, prayer, though externalized, was in essence directed inwards. Prayer was a plea, a preparation, a cleansing that enabled him to hear his inner voice. The Ekadash Vrata, the eleven vows allowed for this waiting upon God.

The act of waiting meant to perform one’s actions in a desireless or detached manner. The Gita describes this state as a condition of sthitpragnya. The state of sthitpragnya was for Gandhi not only a philosophical ideal but a personal aspiration. A sthitpragnya is one who puts away ‘all the cravings that arise in the mind and finds comfort for himself only from the atman’,⁸ and one ‘whose sense are reined in on all sides from their objects’,⁹ so that the mind is ‘untroubled in sorrows and longeth not for joys, who is free from passion, fear and wrath’;10 who knows attachment nowhere; only such a brahmachari can be in the world ‘ moving among sense objects with the sense weaned from likes and dislikes and brought under the control of the atman.’¹¹ This detachment or self-effacement allowed Gandhi to dwell closer to Him. It made possible an act of surrender and allowed him to claim: ‘I have been a willing slave to this most exacting master for more than half a century. His voice has been increasingly audible as years have rolled by. He has never forsaken me even in my darkest hour. He has saved me often against myself and left me not a vestige of independence. The greater the surrender to Him, the greater has been my joy.’¹²

 

In January of 1939, Lord Lothian asked Gandhi if non-violence and love must express themselves in a liberal, democratic and constitutional form of government. Gandhi told him that a society deliberately constituted in accordance with the law of non-violence would be different both in structure and in its material particulars from other societies. Gandhi was convinced that western democracies, even those of England, America and France, were so only in name because their faith in violence persisted, although they differed from others in their capacity to organize violence. Gandhi stressed that at a time of inevitable clash with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the democracies would win because they would have the backing of their people who imagine that they have a voice in their government. But for him, wedded to non-violence that he was, ‘constitutional or democratic government is a distant dream so long as non-violence is not recognized as a living force, an inviolable creed, not a mere policy.’¹³

Violence for Gandhi could never protect the weak nor provide them with same opportunities as the strongest. Violence could at best have patronizing regard for the weak. The spirit of democracy that was fast spreading across India would purge, Gandhi hoped, our institutions of the idea of predominance and subordination. The way to achieve this for Gandhi was constructive work, satyagraha, charkha, village industries, removal of untouchability and non-violent organization of labour. In the absence of the organization of the poor, Gandhi feared that India, like the West, would have democracy only in name, which would in fact hide violence under its cloak.

In 1940, Gandhi had no hesitation in calling western democracies diluted forms of Nazism and Fascism. He said, ‘Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted Nazism and Fascism. At best it is merely a cloak to hide the Nazi and Fascist tendencies of imperialism.’¹⁴ Gandhi’s disappointment with western democracy was due to the fact that it did not explicitly prohibit violence, including the use of arms by armies. A democracy that regards army men as saviours can only be a poor democracy as military force, according to him, interfered with free growth of the mind and smothered the human soul.

 

Democracy to sustain itself had to create, according to Gandhi, conditions whereby every citizen had the opportunity to receive wisdom as distinguished from knowledge of facts so called, because only such a society could create and sustain disciplined and enlightened democracy. ‘Democracy disciplined and enlightened is the finest thing in the world. A democracy prejudiced, ignorant, superstitious will land itself in chaos and may be self-destroyed.’¹⁵ This divided the ever so thin but persistent difference between mob-law and people-law. This distinction became clearer to him during the euphoric days of non-cooperation and the Khilafat agitation. It deeply perturbed him, even before the tragic violence of Chauri Chaura. Gandhi was agitated by the tendency of the leaders of the Congress to submit to the rule of the mob. He warned that such tendencies could only lead to thoughtless, profitless, wicked and harmful destruction. He characterized the Congress as an organization that deferred to the mob. ‘The Congress is a demonstration for the mob and in that sense and that only.’¹⁶ He warned the leaders who worked the mobs of the horrors awaiting them. The capacity of the hero or the leader to control the mob was contingent upon the sympathy between the leader and the mob; the moment the cord breaks it unleashes chaos.

Gandhi wanted the Congress to become an organization that could turn the mob’s law into law of the people, evolve order out of chaos. Gandhi saw Indian public life aesthetically deficient, as it could not recognize the difference between order and chaos, between mob and people. He said, ‘The stumbling block is that we have neglected music. Music means rhythm, order.’¹⁷ He advocated the use of music at Congress rallies to inculcate a sense of order and help create nationalized music in the modern sense.

The cultivation of voluntary restraint, discipline and submission to the rule of law became Gandhi’s lifelong struggle with the Congress and the people of India. As the people turned increasingly violent and hence moved away from democracy, Gandhi declared that the days of appeal to him were over. ‘The days of appeal to me are gone. The cloak of non-violence which we had put on during the British regime is no longer necessary. Therefore, violence faces us in terrible nakedness.’¹⁸

 

Footnotes:

1. CWMG, Vol. 71, p. 82.

2. Ibid., vol. 25, pp. 23-24.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., vol. 52, p. 130.

5. Hind Swaraj, p. 53.

6. CWMG, vol. 55, p. 255.

7. CWMG, vol. 52, p. 244.

8. Bhagvad Gita, Discourse II: verse 55.

9. Discourse II: verse 68.

10. Discourse II: verse 56.

11. Discourse II: verse 64.

12. CWMG, vol. 55, p. 121.

13. CWMG, vol. 68, p. 390.

14. CWMG, vol. 72, pp. 60-61.

15. CWMG, vol. 47, p. 236.

16. CWMG, vol. 18, p. 240.

17. Ibid., p. 241.

18. CWMG, vol. 90, p. 399.