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.”Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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 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 out in day-to-day practice cannot be called religious.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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. 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 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.”Footnote ¹⁰ But that argument is qualified by 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.Footnote 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 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.”Footnote 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 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 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,

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.”Footnote ¹⁴ It could serve as such a model because the fact of violence was itself a fact of 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:

Not surprisingly, Gandhi's words provoked shock, controversy and considerable condemnation.Footnote 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 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,Footnote 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 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 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.”Footnote 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.’”Footnote 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 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.”Footnote 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.’”Footnote 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.

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.