ON GANDHI'S CRITIQUE OF THE STATE: SOURCES, CONTEXTS, CONJUNCTURES ; Rule of Law, Rule of Life: Caste, Democracy, and the Courts in India; Untimely Vision: Aime Cesaire, Decolonization, Utopia; On the Enchantment of the State: Indian Thought on the Role of the State in the Narrative of Modernity; The Charkha (9-1-1940); Speech at Chatham House Meeting (20-10-1931); The 'Village Community' from Munro to Maine; Petition to Natal Assembly (28-6-1894); Speech at Y.M.C.A., Calcutta (25-8-1925); Speech on Swadeshi at Missionary Conference, Madras (14-2-1916); Speech at Meeting of Deccan Princes (28-7-1946); Conflicting Social Obligations; The Nature of the State in Its External Relations; Lucknow School of Economics and Sociology and Its Relevance Today: Some Reflections; Independence (21-7-1946); Question Box (18-7-42); G. D. H. Cole on the General Will: A Socialist Reflects on Rousseau; Enlightened Anarchy--A Political Ideal (Jan 1939); Hyderabad (8-10-1940); Interview to Nirmal Kumar Bose...

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Articles

The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.

M. K. Gandhi

I.

VILLAGE AND STATE FROM MAINE TO GANDHI

The foundations of the Indian state represented a decisive break from the political ideals of the popular face of Indian nationalism, namely that peculiar brand of antistatist politics put forward by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. That in its transformation from anticolonial movement to ruling ideology Indian nationalism came to dissociate itself from any deep commitment to Gandhi's political vision is a striking feature of Indian intellectual and political history. In the crucial debates of the constituent assembly, excepting some cursory concessions, the Gandhian goal of constructing a federal polity upon the self-organizing capacity of the Indian village was consciously rejected in favor of a strong, centralized (not to mention militarized) state that would be the agent of economic and social modernization. ¹While Gandhi's late pessimism about India's future was undoubtedly tied to the experience of partition and the violence it unleashed, it also partly stemmed from his sense that the Indian National Congress in its quest for independence had betrayed the implicit promise of true swaraj (self-rule or independence) and the transformational politics he thought his popular mobilizations had awakened. Gandhi criticized the Congress's use of nonviolent resistance (satyagraha) against British rule as merely instrumental and came to lament the inability of Indian nationalism to make nonviolence the foundation of a new kind of politics tout court. Indeed, Gandhi contended that, with independence, "the Congress in its present shape and form, i.e., as a propaganda vehicle and parliamentary machine, [had] outlived its use". He proposed its disbandment as a political party and subsequent reconstitution as a people's service organization ( Lok Sevak Sangh), working for the creation of a nonviolent polity; that is, for "social, moral and economic independence in terms of [India's] seven hundred thousand villages".²

I propose that the key to understanding this vision of a nonviolent political order lies in Gandhi's antistatism. Gandhi viewed the state as essentially amoral, incompatible with...