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GANDHI ON DEMOCRACY, POLITICS AND THE

ETHICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

UDAY SINGH MEHTA

Modern Intellectual History / Volume 7 / Issue 02 / August 2010, pp 355 - 371

DOI: 10.1017/S1479244310000119, Published online: 01 July 2010

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1479244310000119

How to cite this article:

UDAY SINGH MEHTA (2010). GANDHI ON DEMOCRACY, POLITICS AND THE
ETHICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE. Modern Intellectual History, 7, pp 355-371
doi:10.1017/S1479244310000119

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Modern Intellectual History, 7, 2 (2010), pp. 355–371 
C Cambridge University Press 2010
doi:10.1017/S1479244310000119

gandhi on democracy, politics

and the ethics of everyday life
uday singh mehta
Political Science Department, Amherst College
E-mail: usmehta@amherst.edu

This paper is about Gandhi’s critique of politics, of which his ambivalence towards
democracy was a part. I argue that for Gandhi the ground of moral action is fearlessness,
while that of political reason is security and self-defense. Gandhi sees the context of
moral action in the mundane fabric of everyday life, in places such as the family
and the village. For that reason he does not believe that moral action requires being
supplemented by the particular kind of unity which politics and the state call for and
necessitate.

Gandhi had a complicated view of democracy. If we think of democracy as

in some minimal sense it is commonly understood—as an interlinked set of
institutional practices that feature regular elections, broad representation and
a spectrum of individual rights, all of which are meant to give expression
to the idea that individuals are free and equal and that the ultimate source
of legitimate political power is the cooperate body of the people, because it
alone is deemed to be sovereign—then one must conclude that Gandhi was
substantially unimpressed by democracy, though not always opposed to it. His
writings are replete with comments critical of the idea of elections, representation
and individual rights. In Hind Swaraj he famously characterized the British
parliament as a “sterile woman and a prostitute,” and identified it as the cause
of a long litany of British and modern woes. In that context he was explicit, “I
pray that India may never be in that plight.”1 Gandhi similarly was not overly
taken with the idea that individuals were naturally free or that they were naturally
equals. In their common rendering these ideas are not of particular importance
to him. Such claims embodied an abstractness that is antithetical to the basic
tenor of his way of thinking. He certainly did not think that the special value of
freedom lay in giving individuals a sense of their political power as citizens. He
did occasionally speak of individual rights; nevertheless it was obligations, and

1
M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).

355
356 uday singh mehta

not rights, that he emphasized. Again he did not always oppose rights, but nor
were they the cherished focus of his considered deliberations on social, political
and ethical matters.
Perhaps most importantly he did not approve of a conception of politics in
which the quest for individual and collective security was motivationally and
normatively primary because he recognized that emphasis as alloyed with the
sanction of state violence in both the domestic and international arenas. In this
sense he did not share one of the founding orientations of modern politics,
including in its democratic variants. There is no denying that an important
tradition of modern political thought has been guided by Hobbes’s rendering of
the Latin expression salus populi suprema lex esto, where salus no longer referred
to salvation, but rather to the safety of individuals, and, more importantly,
to the security of the political society as a whole.2 The primacy of individual
and collective security is an emphasis that is shared by traditions of thought
which in other ways are sharply critical of other aspects of Hobbes’s political
ideas. For similar reasons the idea of sovereignty, either of individuals or of
an established polity, had little hold on Gandhi. He was not drawn to cognate
ideas such as the territorial integrity of states or the importance of nations
having the power to reaffirm that integrity. On these issues his vision was
more capacious, less particularistic and, most importantly, indifferent to the
precise shape of how political power was organized. His conception of unity
was much more linked with the patterns of social and civilizational life and
less with what is now associated with the imperatives of nation states. Gandhi’s
endorsement of democracy was very much in a lower key. It was nestled in the
everyday and commonplace materials of social life, which for him supplied the
conditions of moral action, and not the elevated gravity of the political, which as
he disparagingly said always had “larger purposes.”
And yet, on the other hand, ideas of self-rule, transparency, accountability
and inclusiveness, which are associated with the basic ethos of democracy, are
fundamental to Gandhi’s thought, life and practice. He did more than any
single individual in the twentieth century—more than even Lenin or Mao—
to bring the common man and woman into the fold of public life, on terms
that were marked by a singular absence of hierarchy, prescriptive authority
and the condescension of political parties and traditional elites. It seems fair
to say that but for his influence, the struggle for India’s independence would
have been a much more elite, if not Brahmanical, process. Moreover, the
subsequent postindependence political and social norms of the country would
have been more exclusionary, less mindful of the dignity, though perhaps also

2
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin Classics, 1985), 81.
 gandhi on democracy, politics and the ethics of everyday life 357

less concerned with the material needs, of the most disadvantaged, and hence
at odds with the broad orientation that has characterized, from the outset, the
democratic and legislative thrust of Indian politics. His deep commitment to
openness and truth; his view that individual self-rule was a function of character
and self-discipline and not predicated on traditional markers of education,
gender or property ownership; his view that power, including that of the state,
had no presumptive normative priority—are all consonant with a spirit of
democratic governance. His visage, background (middle-class, middle-caste) and
his life, lived among common people with disregard for sectarian, communal or
economic status, are all exemplary of a profoundly democratic person. Like
Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi ennobled of what was utterly common and ordinary.
His legacy confirms this. Maoists, religious sectarians (Hindu and Muslim) and
secular advocates of a strong state have all equally reviled him and what he stood
for.
What explains this complex and ambivalent relationship with democracy—at
once deeply skeptical and yet also profoundly exemplary? I think the answer
to this question centers around two ideas—violence and politics and the way
they affect the ground of everyday action. For Gandhi, violence and politics,
while often mutually reinforcing each other, also detracted from an attentiveness
to the ethical gravity and context of everyday life. Democracy as a modern
political form gives expression to that connection with violence, along with
a diminished or instrumentalizing view towards everyday actions. Democracy
was not unique in this sense; other forms of organized politics evince the same
connection. Precisely because Gandhi saw an essential link between violence
and politics, non-violence could not be stably affirmed within any political
orientation. It is the underlying link between violence and politics, and what for
Gandhi was a related diminishing of an everyday ethic, that is evident in Gandhi’s
ambivalence to democracy as a political form. This essay explores that underlying
connection.
It is an attention to everyday life that is crucial to understanding Gandhi’s
view of non-violence. In fact one might say that non-violence is what becomes
manifest when there is scrupulous attention to everyday life. For Gandhi violence
and politics are otherworldly. They are deferrals to another time and another
space. That is the warrant for the idealism that backs up modern politics. Like
Max Weber, who believed that modernity had disenchanted the world and thus
had also made it more ghostly and less attentive to the Calvinist gravity of
everyday life, Gandhi’s focus is worldly. He identifies that concern with religion
generally, and with the central message of Gita in particular. Gandhi in fact
demands of religion that it vindicate itself in the hurly-burly of everyday life.
As he says of the author of the Gita, “he has shown that religion must rule our
worldly pursuits. I have felt that the Gita teaches us that what cannot be followed
358 uday singh mehta

out in day-to-day practice cannot be called religious.”3 This leads Gandhi to

so often accept the terms in which social life is given—for example, the caste,
religion or profession one is born into—without resorting to an idealism that
is constitutionally transformative of those social particularities; and yet neither
does he accept an ethical lassitude that is prepared to excuse the self on account
of some metaphysical or religious fatalism. For Gandhi the terms of everyday life,
often in its most banal form, supply the very material through which one gives
ethical substance to one’s life. But the vigilance, intensity and energy he brings
to this ethical enterprise should not be confused with a political purposefulness.
In summarizing the doctrine of the Gita as action with a renunciation of the
fruits of actions, Gandhi is attempting to sever action or the everyday from any
essential teleology. In doing so he undermines the grounds for violence and much
of modern politics because it is essentially invested in a teleology or quite simply
in the deferred “larger purposes” of instantiating justice, material well-being or
political equality. As he says, “When there is no desire for the fruit, there is no
temptation for untruth and himsa [violence]. Take any instance of untruth or
violence, and it will be found that at its back was the desire to attain the cherished
end.”4 There is no making sense, at least of modern politics—democratic or
otherwise—without some notion of cherished ends and of a future in which
those ends will be realized.
Gandhi had a deep abhorrence for war and violence, but his understanding of
these phenomena also makes it clear that his commitment to non-violence cannot
in any simple way be meshed with a modern tradition of thought, which along
with its concern with war, violence and peace, is also deeply committed to notions
such as the public interest, abstract principles of justice, improving the world, and
giving priority to the ontological conditions through which we give expression
to our nature as political animals—namely the idealism of politics. Gandhi could
and did imagine a world in which politics was not the ground of individual or
collective well-being. It is the priority of politics which Gandhi’s understanding
of non-violence sidesteps and denies. Gandhi was also ambivalent about peace,
which he understood to be another form of political entrenchment. He referred
to those who merely opposed war without seeing its link with the surrounding
international context as advocates of an “armed peace.”5 Even as a nationalist, a
designation so often carelessly applied to him, Gandhi was, if at all, a reluctant and
inconsistent votary. He even demurred at the idea of India having a constitution.

3
Mahadev Desai, The Gospel of Selfless Action or The Gita According to Gandhi (Ahmedabad:
Navjivan Publishing House, 1956), 132.
4
Ibid.
5
M. K. Gandhi, The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Raghavan Iyer (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 242.
 gandhi on democracy, politics and the ethics of everyday life 359

As he so often reiterated, “My religion has no geographical limits. If I have a living

faith in it, it will transcend my love for India herself.”6 Even his conception of
independence did not for the most part tally with a national or political vision,
“Swaraj [self-rule] has to be experienced by each one for himself.”7 Or as he says
elsewhere, man “can be independent as soon as he wills it,” thus simultaneously
refusing the complex temporalities on which both imperial and national visions
relied.8 His opposition to violence did not draw on nationalist or communal
justifications. He thought of peace in its familiar rendering as no more than a
punctuation between the patterned and instrumental use of violence and force.

i
The terms peace and war have a shared conceptual provenance in modern
understandings of politics. In this part of the essay I try to make clear that the
relationship of these three terms—peace, war and politics—is indifferent to the
issue of violence. By that I mean that the three terms neither are fundamentally
disposed to violence, nor are they, more importantly, fundamentally opposed to
violence. The relationship between peace, war and violence is strictly conditional.
The normative status of each of these terms depends on a political calculation
in which the “security” of the political community plays a decisive role. An
implication of this claims that there is no principled commitment to non-violence
or an opposition to war. Put differently, in the modern conception of peace there
is no fundamental reason to abjure the use of physical force. Regarding this claim,
George W. Bush was concise and to the point: “I just want you to know that,
when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.”9 This not simply a
rhetorical or conceptual claim, but rather one that is sadly vindicated in everyday
life in which peace does not signify an absence of violence and the aspiration for
peace does not foreclose the possibility of war. In contrast, as I argue, Gandhi’s
views on non-violence stemmed from an attitude towards everyday life, which
was in important senses neither part of the language of peace nor part of that of
politics.
Let me fill out the claim that our common conceptions of peace and politics
are indifferent to the issue of violence and non-violence. I will to do this by briefly

6
M. K. Gandhi, Essential Writings, ed. V. V. Ramana Murti (New Delhi: Gandhi Peace
Foundation, 1970), 147.
7
Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 73.
8
M. K. Gandhi, Harijan, 11 Jan. 1936 (emphasis added).
9
The entire speech is available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/
20020618-1.html. It should be pointed out that President Obama makes precisely this
point in his Nobel Prize speech on 12 Oct. 2009.
360 uday singh mehta

considering the operative logic in the narratives regarding the origins of political
society that one finds in Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. I go back to these
thinkers because I take their views to be, in the relevant sense, still substantially
accurate with respect to how we conceptualize war, peace and politics in the
modern era. Notwithstanding their considerable normative difference on a vast
range of issues, with regard to the relationship of war and politics, Hobbes and
Locke remain within a broad consensus that includes thinkers such as Kant, Hegel
and J. S. Mill.
In the narratives that Hobbes and Locke offer for explaining and justifying
the origins of politics, human beings are placed in a state of nature. This is an
unregulated state with no supervening power or authority. Given human nature
and the absence of a supervening power, so the argument goes, this natural
state is liable to descend rapidly into a condition of war in which human life
and interests are inescapably threatened by the imminence of disorder (i.e. the
absence of peace) and, ultimately, violent death. It is the prospect of this dire
predicament which leads individuals, with a primary interest in avoiding their
own death and securing their interests, to contract out of the natural state, to
surrender all or some of their natural powers, thus forming a political society,
which can deploy the power of the state to regulate the interactions between
individuals and between different states. When such regulation is successful, i.e.
when the state does the job for which it was authorized, individuals can pursue
their interests, and, via various forms of coordination, the interests of the society
as a whole. This is what is designated peace, i.e. where the conditions for the
pursuit of individual and collective interests are stable and hence unlike the
original state of nature.
What is important to note is that in this classic and protean narrative that
encourages and justifies the formation of political society and authorizes the
power of the state there is no argument against killing, violence or war per se.
The rationale for political society does not stem from a moral disapproval of
the fact that human beings in pursuit of their interests are—or as Rousseau
would qualify it, have become—trigger-happy and murderous. Instead, violence
and killing carry no clear moral opprobrium. There is nothing like the biblical
injunction, however attenuated by other claims, against killing or the sanctity
of life on account of which it is to be preserved. Killing and violence are merely
indicators of a condition of disorder, or, to use Locke’s term “inconvenience,”
which vitiates the pursuit of individual interests, including crucially an interest in
one’s security. Locke does have an argument, drawn from natural law, that enjoins
humans to “preserve the rest of mankind.”10 But that argument is qualified by

10
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, rev. edn (New York: Mentor,
1965), 311.
 gandhi on democracy, politics and the ethics of everyday life 361

the priority given to “preserve [one] self”, and as is evident from his chapter on
war the force of that argument does not in any case carry over to proscribe the
use of deadly force.11
The several arguments that both Hobbes and Locke offer regarding how each
of us wishes to avoid painful and violent death have a crucial force in motivating
the rationale for political society. But they are prudential arguments, addressed
to individuals with a rational interest in preserving their own lives and interests.
Indeed they make prudence the ground of politics. War in the state of nature and
the absence of peace are simply conditions in which prudence would be denied
and for which political society offers a purported redress. But the rationality of
that redress need not, and typically among modern political thinkers is not, part
of a general argument against either violence, killing or war per se. The state, once
it is formed, simply regulates violence in light of the contract that authorizes its
power. In an unregulated condition characterized by human equality and other
aspects of the state of nature, killing and violence are merely imprudent—the idea
being that under conditions where others have much the same resources and the
same intensity for a desire to live, the strategy of deploying violence to secure one’s
interests, sooner or later, is likely to prove to be self-defeating. This is clearly a
conditional argument and not a moral one in the sense that it is not backed by any
broad imperative and certainly not an imperative against violence, killing or the
use of force. It is easy to imagine a risk-taker not being moved by it, or conditions
under which the rational expectations from violence are better than those from
abjuring violence. Clearly war and violence remain conditionally rational within
this tradition of thought. From the standpoint of the state, violence is hence again
conditionally rational so long as it is in the service of the public interest and the
security of the political community. In Hobbes quite obviously, but also in Locke,
the original contract does not in any way constrain war, violence and killing in the
face of a threat to the political community. The conditional rationality of violence
that marked the individual in the state of nature, or the Hobbesian axiom homo
homini lupus (man is a wolf to man), now merely conditions the behavior and
rationality of the state. The state, once it is formed into a cooperative singular
entity, must, for the sake of its own preservation, in principle, retain a strictly
conditional and hence permissive attitude towards war and violence. That is to
say, it must understand the sentences with which Michael Ignatieff begins his
book The Lesser Evil as being prudential, idealistic, perhaps tragically ironic, but

11
Ibid.: “Everyone as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station willfully;
so by the like reason when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as
much as he can, preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice to an
offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, liberty,
health, limb, or goods of another.” Also see II, #16.
362 uday singh mehta

not self-contradictory: “When democracies fight terrorism, they are defending

the proposition that their political life should be free of violence. But defeating
terror requires violence. It may also require coercion, deception, secrecy, and
violation of rights.”12 The deference for present violence, coercion, deception
and the like comes from deferring to a political ideal in which the absence of
violence is predicated on some sort of ultimate temporal reckoning.

ii
Before moving to a consideration of Gandhi, I want to offer a very schematic
and grossly simplified overview of the tradition of modern politics. There are
four aspects of this very general narrative that I want to single out because they
relate to relevant features of Gandhi’s thought that I will deal with in the final
section of this essay.
The first is simply that in this tradition, politics pertains to the interactions
among individuals and states, and not to individuals in solo. The fact that politics
relates only to the interactions between individuals and states also means that it
is largely indifferent to that which is solely in the individual interest, or what one
might think of as his or her being, i.e. the quality of their integrity.
The second feature of this narrative is that politics necessarily involves
instrumental forms of reasoning and acting. It is only by being in principle
instrumental that politics can concern itself with the various contingencies that
pertain to public life, and only thus can it attend to advancing the interests of
the whole or public interest which undergirds the normative basis of political
society and the state. Moreover, this instrumentalism fundamentally marks the
status of the citizen. He or she must accept being part of a universe in which the
contingencies that effect the advancement of the whole will necessarily refract
his or her standing as a citizen. The citizen must therefore have a sacrificial self-
understanding. At the limit, citizenship is just a form of soldiering in which, as
they say, one must be prepared to die, so that others may live. Modern politics,
as Weber famously conjectured, may have triumphed only by disenchanting the
world and ridding it of magic. But in another sense it imbues every moment and
every act in the world with a mysterious quality because it can only be assessed
by reference to some interminable calculus of collective benefit and collective
security.
The third aspect of this narrative, which relates to the point about
instrumentalism and to the point that is to follow, pertains directly to violence.
Modern politics cannot foreclose on the use of violence without also giving up

12
Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), xiii.
 gandhi on democracy, politics and the ethics of everyday life 363

on its constitutive commitment to advance the public interest. The absolutism

of politics, namely a commitment to securing individual and public interest,
requires a commensurate absolutism of the means, and those, in principle, if
not always in fact, must include the warrant to deploy violent means. Weber’s
definition of the state as having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is
largely just a more blunt restatement of the more general claim that if the public
interest must be an overriding priority then the state must have the means to
assert that priority. Violence, put simply, cannot, given this priority, be proscribed
in principle.
The final feature of the narrative of modern politics is what might be called its
inherent idealism. In being concerned with the public interest and with progress
more generally, modern politics expresses an imperative energy to improve the
world. Modern politics in its various ideological variants has always associated
political power with that capacious imperative for the betterment of life. This is
no less true in Locke than it is in Marx and Mill. As with the other points I have
made, a lot more needs to be said about this issue, including of course pointing
to the various instruments through which liberals in particular have tried to limit
the use of power.
My purpose in very briefly delineating these four aspects of the tradition
of modern politics is to set up a contrast with Gandhi and to suggest that
within this tradition of political thinking, peace can only be understood as a
form of order, and that order itself has no clear relation with violence or its
opposite. That is, violence can be an instrument for peace and order, and hence
for bettering the world and being true to the idealism that I have said is inherent
in modern politics. Alternatively, violence may be something that undermines
order. Precisely because it can, as it were, go both ways, politics can take no
principled view on the matter of violence. I suppose the simplest way to make
this point is to state the obvious, namely that most modern wars have been
authorized in the name of peace and order.

iii
The contrast with Gandhi is stark. In my view it is so stark that one must
consider Gandhi not just as having a very different politics, but rather, in some
crucial sense, as being a deeply anti-political thinker. One should be open to the
thought that despite his having transformed the political landscape, he may have
done so as an anti-political activist. If there is something puzzling in this claim
it is only because we have become so accustomed and unselfconscious about
the idea that politics defines the domain of all significant collective action, and
because for that reason we assume that all significant transformations must have
a political purpose as their cause. Not surprisingly, the distinctive transformative
364 uday singh mehta

energy which Gandhi infused into the public life of India in the first half of
the twentieth century is always designated political—thus at the level of naming
depriving it of much of its originality.
Gandhi at any rate rejects all four of the points I have identified with the
tradition of modern political thought. He firmly abjures the idea of a secular
teleology of progress and the accompanying valorization of politics and the state.
His commitment to non-violence can only be understood by acknowledging that
he did not view the world solely or even primarily in political terms. Non-violence
for Gandhi is not a cognate of peace. It does not refer, as it does in the tradition of
political thinking I have been referring to, as a condition of public order secured
through the surrounding proximity of fear, punishment and power. As he said in
Hind Swaraj,
When peace was secured and people became simple-minded, its full effect was toned
down. If I ceased stealing for fear of punishment, I would recommence the operation as
soon as the fear is withdrawn from me. This is almost a universal experience. We have
assumed that we can get men to do things by force and, therefore, we use force.13

Non-violence is different because it does not stem from the world view in which
the avoiding of death, the furthering of the public interests or the bettering of the
world are primary concerns. Gandhi did not think that corporeal vulnerability
was in need of redress. It was an ineradicable fact of life subject to contingency
but also to moral response. He embraced the contingency and made it the very
ground for crafting a morally meaningful response to it. He did not believe
that the only redress to this predicament of vulnerability was the formation of
political society. Instead he accepted the fear that came with the vulnerability by
transmuting it into the demand for courage—courage in which there was the
permanent willingness to surrender or sacrifice one’s life. In doing so he blunted
the principal motive of political society—fear and the prospect of security.
Courage, while it blunts the motive for political society, also extends the ambit
of moral action to everyday life. One must, for Gandhi, always be prepared to
sacrifice one’s life for the sake of moral action. This is why for Gandhi the scene of
battle, be it the fratricidal war at the heart of the Mahabharata, the Boer War, the
First World War or the Jewish predicament in the Second World War, all constitute
exemplary sites for moral action. He was drawn to the battlefield, because it
exemplified something commonplace for him. It was the model of everyday life,
not the exceptional predicament against which to construct a political refuge. As
he said, “the opportunity [for non-violence] comes to everyone almost daily.”14
It could serve as such a model because the fact of violence was itself a fact of

13
Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 80.
14
Gandhi, Essential Writings, ed. Raghavan Iyer, 250.
 gandhi on democracy, politics and the ethics of everyday life 365

everyday life, not something that could be quarantined or pacified by the lure
of political society. The very ubiquity of violence in the natural state, which for
Hobbes served as the ground for a political sequestration, for Gandhi serves as
the basis for articulating the universality of ethics, an ethics centered around the
notion of sacrifice and not security.
Nowhere was Gandhi’s call to sacrifice more audacious and controversial than
in what he said he would do were he a Jew in Germany faced with the genocidal
might of Hitler and the Nazis. Writing in November 1938 in the journal Harijan in
response to letters that had sought his views on what was happening in Germany
and Palestine, Gandhi responded in words that deserve to be quoted at length:

The nobler cause would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born
and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense that Christians
born in France are French. If the Jews have no home but Palestine, will they relish the idea
of being forced to leave the other parts of the world in which they are settled? Or do they
want a double home where they remain at will? This cry for the national home affords a
colourable justification for the German expulsion of Jews. But the German persecution
of Jews seems to have no parallel in history. The tyrants of old never went so mad as
Hitler seems to have gone. And he is doing it with religious zeal. For, he is propounding a
new religion of exclusive and militant nationalism in the name of which any inhumanity
becomes an act of humanity to be rewarded here and hereafter. The crime of an obviously
mad but intrepid youth is being visited upon this whole race with unbelievable ferocity. If
there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of humanity, a war against Germany, to
prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified. But I do not
believe in any war. A discussion of the pros and cons of such a war is, therefore, outside
my horizon or province . . . Germany is showing to the world how efficiently violence
can be worked when it is not hampered by any hypocrisy or weakness masquerading as
humanitarianism. It is also showing how hideous, terrible and terrifying it looks in its
nakedness. Can the Jews resist this organized and shameless persecution? Is there a way to
preserve their self-respect and not to feel helpless, neglected and forlorn? I submit there
is. If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would
claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German might, and challenge him
to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to
discriminating treatment. And for doing this I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join
me in civil resistance, but would have confidence that in the end the rest were bound to
follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered,
he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring
them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the
world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare
hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated
violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first
answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared
for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of
366 uday singh mehta

thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands
of the tyrant.15

Not surprisingly, Gandhi’s words provoked shock, controversy and

considerable condemnation.16 But they deserve to be considered carefully. There
are two broad issues that Gandhi refers to in his statement: first that of a Jewish
national homeland in Palestine, and second the German Jews’ response to the
barbarity of Hitler. For Gandhi the two issues are linked, but I will initially
consider them separately.
Regarding the second issue, Gandhi’s suggestion that were he a Jew born, bred
and earning his livelihood in Germany—that is to say, if he were a German in the
most mundane social sense of the term—he would defy the discriminatory racial
laws, at the risk of being imprisoned and killed. Gandhi’s suggestion is implicit in
the very question he asks. It is not the question of how German Jews can survive
in a corporeal sense, but rather how can they “preserve their self-respect and
not . . . feel helpless, neglected and forlorn?” He would refuse to be expelled; that
is, he would refuse to be made forcibly into a deserter from the scene of the battle
for self-respect. He would stand up to the “tallest German gentile”; that is, refuse
to concede that race, religion or law should define a homeland. He would act
alone, but with the full confidence that his example would be followed by other
Jews, without his even advocating such concurrence. He would, that is, refrain
from transforming the singular moral act into a collective and strategic political
act. He would even spurn the support of Britain, France and America, knowing
that such support would at best be for his security and not for the inner joy and
strength that motivates and gives meaning to his action. He would act with a
full measure of self-confidence knowing, as a religious man, that his God would
not forsake him. And finally, he would do all this without any assurance that his
actions would leave the Jews better or worse off with respect to the violence that
might be visited on them. The act of self-sacrifice or non-violence would thus
have been relieved of the incalculable effects of its external implication. It would
represent what he elsewhere calls a credal commitment and not a mere policy
option. It would literally be an autonomous act—that is to say, self-legislated,
indifferent to the world of appearances—and all this having relied only on the

15
M. K. Gandhi, Non-violence in Peace and War, vol. 2 (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Publishing
House, 1942), p. 170–172.
16
Among those who responded to Gandhi’s views on Jews in Germany, the Nazis and
migration to Palestine were Hannah Arendt, Joan Bondurant, Martin Buber and Judah
Magnes. Gandhi’s views on these matters have been very thoughtfully considered by
Gangeya Mukherji in “Gandhi: Calling to Non-violence Joined by a strong Pragmatism”
(unpublished). Also see Dennis Dalton, Nonviolence in Action: Gandhi’s Power (New Delhi:
Oxford Press, 2007).
 gandhi on democracy, politics and the ethics of everyday life 367

most mundane of social facts, namely birth and the conditions of one’s livelihood.
Like Arjuna, whose call to moral action, in Gandhi’s view, stemmed from the
mundane concern for the wives and children of his kinsmen,17 Gandhi, as a
German Jew, would find his motivation for the ultimate bodily sacrifice in an
inescapable and prosaic everyday reality. There was, as George Orwell noticed in
his review of Gandhi’s Autobiography, something profoundly democratic in his
exacting moral standards. One can imagine Gandhi being deeply impressed by
stories of knights in shining armor performing acts of great valor, and thinking
that such acts were the template for acts of moral valor and that they were written
for people like himself, who hardly wore any clothes and came from the most
middling of backgrounds.
The other matter Gandhi refers in his statement relates to the issue of a
homeland for the Jews in Palestine, but it captures his broader views on the
sort of unity that a political homeland must evince. Gandhi was of course
aware that in seeking a homeland in Palestine the Jews were seeking a national
state anchored in the exclusive particularity of their religion. They were like the
Muslim League in its advocacy for Pakistan. In this one might say Gandhi was
confirmed by the frequency with which Jinnah and the Pakistani state, without
any sense of irony, invoked Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet The Jewish State. But
more relevantly, for Gandhi, this demand made the Jews analogous to Hitler
and the Germans, whose ideology he identified as a form of exclusive religious
nationalism. The demand for a Jewish state thus vindicated the exclusionary laws
that mandated the expulsion of Jews from Germany or wherever they lived. The
claim of exclusivity when backed by a religious and national form could not be
squared with the idea of Jews being at home in many different places or wherever
they happened to live. Moreover, if the nation state, with its assurance of security
for its exclusive members, was the appropriate mode of existence for particular
religious groups, then at the limit the demand for a Jewish state vindicated
even the Nazi “inhumanity” that professed to be “an act of humanity.” If the
appropriate destiny of human beings was to be organized into political nation

17
“Let us suppose that Arjuna flees the battlefield. Though his enemies are wicked people,
are sinners, they are his relations and he cannot bring himself to kill them. If he leaves the
field, what would happen to those vast numbers on his side? If Arjuna went away, leaving
them behind, would the Kauravas have mercy on them? If he left the battle, the Pandava
army would be simply annihilated. What, then, would be the plight of their wives and
children? . . . If Arjuna had left the battlefield, the very calamities which he feared would
have befallen them. Their families would have been ruined, and the traditional dharma of
these families and the race would have been destroyed. Arjuna, therefore, had no choice
but to fight.” M. K. Gandhi, The Bhagvadgita (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1980), 20. I
thank Faisal Devji for drawing my attention to this passage.
368 uday singh mehta

states, then the inhumanity visited on them to achieve this would, at a minimum,
have considerable normative, or rather political, credence.
That was precisely the form of life that Gandhi wished to challenge. It is the
specifically political sort of unity, the making of one people, a body politic, which
Gandhi viewed with suspicion because he saw in it a concern with corporeality
that could never resolve itself into fearlessness. It was from the very outset
concerned with the preservation of life and security and not with the conditions
of moral actions. To the extent that such unity valued sacrifice it had to garner
that through a contractual relationship with a group of people specifically chosen
for that purpose, such as those in the army and the police. It is worth noting that
in Gandhi’s statement regarding the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine he
makes no reference to the Palestinians who would be and were being displaced
from their homeland. He knew this; in other contexts he even wrote of it. It is
not from a lack of sympathy for their plight that he does not mention them,
but rather because that plight is extraneous to the main point he is making. To
bring up the matter of the injustice of Palestinian displacement was itself to raise
a political consideration, which the British in the context of the mandate were
happy to consider in terms of some compromise or negotiated settlement. This
was their preferred way of dealing with such matters, as the partition of Ireland
had proved and as the later partitioning of India and the island of Cyprus were
to confirm.
Gandhi’s point here, as elsewhere, was different. It was to draw attention to a
kind of specifically political unity, which by its emphasis on the collective security
of an exclusive group and the rigidity of borders and territorial markers that
singled out that group evacuated the everyday conditions of moral action. Those
conditions for Gandhi belonged to the unity and the diversity of the social; to the
arbitrary contingencies that people found themselves in; to the places where they
were born, lived and worshiped, Jews living in France or in Germany, Muslims
who had Hindu neighbors with different dietary taboos, or Indians who lived in
South Africa but, as Gandhi said, “lived as though they were living in India” and
hence in their everyday lives were indifferent to the vast distance that separated
them from their natal land. He associated the cornucopia of the social, and not
the idealism of the political, with the conditions that made self-knowledge, and
through it moral action, possible. It was under such diverse and commonplace
conditions that non-violence could be a way a living.
Non-violence, Gandhi makes clear in his discourse on the Gita, is something
negative, indeed it has, he says, “no existence of its own.” Unlike violence, it does
not intervene in the world, it is not backed by a plan, it does not have a product,
indeed it achieves nothing external. Violence, which is ratified by a plan, seeks
to intervene and affect the world in instrumental ways; that is, it intervenes in
the chain of cause and effect. In contrast, non-violence withdraws, not from the
 gandhi on democracy, politics and the ethics of everyday life 369

world but rather to the self and its quotidian surroundings. Gandhi’s point is that
non-violence, like spinning, celibacy, and silence, represents a mode of human
existence in which there is self-conscious withdrawal from the instrumental
world of political action. Still it is a site of action, for practices are acts, but not of
political action, in part because they refer only to self. For Gandhi these practices
(it is important to see them as practices) are valorized precisely because the effect
they produce is on the self and not the world. In fact one might say they are
not predicated on the connection or interrelatedness between the self and the
world. They abjure the purposefulness and idealization which I have claimed
mark politics and inform its relationship with violence. In a short essay devoted
mainly to the inherent importance of eating leafy vegetables and unpolished rice
and on “how best to clean latrines,” Gandhi says, “One must forget the political
goal in order to realize it [the natural life]. To think in terms of the political goal
in every matter and at every step is to raise unnecessary dust.”18
Celibacy, fasting, spinning and silence give back to everyday activities a
materiality and gravity that is lost to them through their incorporation in
the instrumentality of a politics that always has a “larger purpose.” They are
paradigmatically tactile in the sense that the act subsumes its effects. They are
also instances in which the temporal and effectual distinction between means and
ends is collapsed: “They say ‘means are after all means’, I would say ‘means are after
all everything.’”19 For an act to have materiality for the self, it must be withdrawn
from the sphere in which its meaning is always constitutionally dependent on an
incorporation into the whole and the attendant chain of uncertain implications
that might stem from it. That is precisely the domain of politics and especially
of a politics wedded to a progressive teleology. Non-violence, like the practices
Gandhi associates with it, is championed precisely because nothing external
follows from it. The practices are not tied to a future, or dependent on a past.
As practices they lack the requisite abstractness to have implications. They are
in a manner contained by the act itself. There is here a resonance with Kant’s
ethics because only if an act can be separated from its purposeful effects can it
be, for both Gandhi and Kant, autonomous. The resonance also points to the
vexing relationship in both Kant and Gandhi between their ethical and political
writings.
Gandhi eschews instrumentality to the degree that he denies even the role of
abstract principles as means of coordinating actions. Akeel Bilgrami has pointed
out in an important essay on Gandhi that exemplary action takes the place of
both moral and political principles. Only by this substitution can the violence
that is implicit even in moral principles themselves be neutralized. As Bilgrami

18
M. K. Gandhi, Harijan, 11 Jan. 1936.
19
M. K. Gandhi, Harijan, Feb. 1937.
370 uday singh mehta

puts it, “if someone fails to follow your example, you may be disappointed but
you would no longer have the conceptual basis to see them as transgressive and
wrong and subject to criticism.”20 Bilgrami’s identification of the importance of
exemplary action is consonant with what I have earlier referred to as Gandhi’s
anchoring moral acts in the most mundane aspects of everyday social and
individual existence. Unlike the elevated nomological perch from which Kantian
imperatives acquire their moral credence, in Gandhi the moral is often no more
than a firm subjective commitment whose consequences one is prepared to abide
by. For example, even when Gandhi refers to violence he typically presents his
opposition to it in terms that resist the abstractness of moral principles. In a letter
to Esther Faering in 1917 he wrote, “what is our duty as individuals. I have come
to this workable decision by myself, ‘I will not kill for any cause whatsoever, but
be killed by him if resistance of his will renders my being killed necessary.’”21 His
language, even about an issue that matters so deeply to him, suggests a private
sort of subjective conviction utterly devoid of larger purposefulness. The self
becomes the governing armature of everything. It leans on neither history nor
the future. And in doing so it repudiates the first point I made with reference
to the narrative of modern politics in which individuals are relevant only to the
extent that they interact with others and not in their description in solo.
Gandhi’s ideas challenge the modern tradition of political thinking, including
its democratic versions, at a deep level because they question the value of a
form of knowledge and action that underwrites ideas such as the public interest,
political freedom, equality of rights and even justice. Such ideas must after all
be abstract. This is what led Martin Luther King Jr, following his visit to India
in 1959, to qualify the enormous admiration he had for Gandhi and his ideas on
non-violence. King knew that his was a struggle for the civil rights of African
Americans and as such it could not stand apart from the American political
creed. However much that struggle, under King’s guidance, attempted to stay a
course in which violence was eschewed, it was nevertheless a struggle in which
the central demand was for the fulfillment of a political and constitutional ideal.
Non-violence was thus an instrument to realize a political goal and that too for a
group that had been denied that goal. King understood this, and he understood
that it limited the extent to which the civil rights movement could share the
deeper purposes of Gandhi’s view of non-violence. Ultimately Gandhi’s non-
violent practices were not meant to be redemptive instruments for groups or for
the realization of political ideals.

20
Akeel Bilgrami, “Gandhi: The Philosopher,” Economic Political Weekly 38/39 (2003), 4163.
21
M. K. Gandhi, Soul Force: Gandhi’s Writings on Peace, ed. V. Geetha (Chennai: Tara Books,
2004), 99.
 gandhi on democracy, politics and the ethics of everyday life 371

In contrast, I have been trying to suggest, for Gandhi non-violence is a form of

individual existence that is scrupulously attentive to the contingent or arbitrarily
given features of everyday life—things such as where one is born, where one
earns ones livelihood and who would care for one’s kinsfolk. For Gandhi actions
acquire their ethical substance by resisting an incorporation into a broader
collective calculus of harms and benefits and freedom and security. Practices such
as spinning, fasting and silence, and non-violence more generally, are ways of
being in the world, which, in some crucial sense, are indifferent to the imperative
to transform the world. They ultimately harbor an indifference to politics and
therefore must have an ambivalence towards it even in its democratic form.