The Problem of Idealism

Gandhi famously claimed that he was “not a visionary” but rather a “practical idealist” ([1920e] 1999, 134). A practical orientation to politics, which put ideals into practice, was understood as one that turned fundamentally on the problem of political means. In politics, Gandhi contended, “means are after all everything” ([1924b] 1999, 310); they not only shape the realization of political ends but are also implicated in the very nature of political conflict. As is often recognized, the call to scrupulously attend to the question of means was a sharp rejection of the logic of expediency in politics. Gandhi considered modern politics to be saturated by a kind of instrumentalist, means–ends thinking, in which violence and coercion had become widely permissible and explicitly defended as legitimate. However, the rejection of instrumentalist calculation in politics, and more broadly the “doctrine of the sword . . . in this age of the rule of brute force” ([1920e] 1999, 133), was not only directed at a kind of prosaic Machiavellianism. The risk of sliding into rationalizations of political violence was just as acute for political idealisms in which right or noble ends work to enable, justify, or redeem the use of dubious political means.Footnote ⁷ It is important to keep in mind the extent to which Gandhi's political thinking was animated and framed by a continual worry about the potential for violence in the gamut of idealist enthusiasms—from anarchist nationalism, aggressive religious revivalism, to revolutionary Marxism—that shaped the ideological landscape of Indian anticolonial politics.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, Hind Swaraj, Gandhi's famous Reference Gandhi1909 tract on Indian home rule, was occasioned by and structured as an argument with militant nationalism and its recommended tactic of the time, the targeted political assassination.

In Gandhian terms, the signature failing of political idealism is its focus on ends at the expense of means.Footnote ⁹ This disjuncture between means and ends is associated with two kinds of political hazards. First, the commitment to ideals when detached from a specification of means is subject to a distinct form of moral erosion; namely, it can have a morally disinhibiting effect on its proponents.Footnote ¹⁰ “[T]o serve the noblest of causes,” political idealism becomes susceptible to taking and legitimating “short-violent-cuts to success” ([1924c] 1999, 442). The temptation to use any and all available means for even small or temporary gains seemingly becomes greater in proportion to one's belief in and attachment to ends. The dynamic may actually function in the reverse; that is, it might be precisely because the gains are small or nonexistent (or even negative and deleterious) that insisting on the rightness of principles becomes ever more politically urgent. In either case, the exaltation of ends becomes all too easily implicated in the justification of various forms of political coercion.

Second, idealism can facilitate tendencies toward ideological entrenchment in politics. Where previously the strong attachment to principles papered over corrosive moral compromises, here the worry is that when political disagreements are framed as arguments over fundamental principles, the potential for political progress may dissipate in an atmosphere of increasing hostility and polarization. Consider Gandhi's response to Nehru's entreaty in 1933 to define more sharply the egalitarian goals of the Indian National Congress's future economic policy:

What Gandhi termed his “temperamental differences” with Nehru are couched in terms of a broader statement about why the clarification of goals “would fail to take us there” without a serious consideration of effective means. More subtly, Gandhi implied that the ways in which ends are invoked, presented, and insisted on can themselves engender resistance; that is, they may prove counterproductive to the process of converting natural opponents to the cause of reform. At the extreme, an uncompromising insistence on ideals may not only lead to the use of coercion but may also slide into a moralistic politics of conviction or ideological dogmatism that, for Gandhi, were especially liable to breed contempt and engender a logic of escalation.

Importantly, in both these scenarios, the actual processes of political interaction and contestation, especially the subjective-psychological investments and reactions they provoke, are seen to objectively threaten the attainability of ends advanced. The practical and moral hazards of political idealism—the moral erosion that leads to the use of coercive tactics and forms of contestation that produce an atmosphere of hostility—point to what Gandhi took to be acute dangers inherent in the very practice of politics. In other words, Gandhi's insistent call to attend to “the conservation of the means and their progressive use” is closely tied to a view of politics as a realm marked by recalcitrance and tendencies toward conflict and violence. Pointing to idealism's indifference to political means is therefore another way of signaling its larger blindness to the internal dynamics of political life that shape the realization of ends.

Idealisms, old and new, have a difficult time thinking conceptually about the practical constraints of political activity. This is indeed one of the most insistent charges made by the new realists; namely that contemporary political philosophy does not dwell long enough on problems of implementation, especially political impediments to implementation (Geuss Reference Geuss2008; Williams Reference Williams and Hawthorn2005b). More often, political philosophy assumes or envisions apolitical or extrapolitical models of how ideal theory could be enacted in the world. For instance, when political conflict is understood as a contestation over rival conceptions of the good or the just, the search for consensus or agreement becomes the presumed solution to the problems of politics. Here, educative models, in which public reason through debate and discussion is thought to lead to the dissemination and transformation of political values, take the place of politics. Alternatively, political theory speaks in the voice of the state or from a position of power, concerning itself with outlining legislation or policy along proposed normative guidelines. As Williams has noted, the implied reader or “listener”—whether it is a Supreme Court Justice or high-level policy maker – is here akin to the omnipotent legislator or founder; that is, someone who functions with as few “purely political restrictions” as possible (2005b, 57–58). To critics, these assumptions are taken to exemplify political philosophy's, and especially contemporary liberalism's, tendency toward the evasion of politics.Footnote ¹¹ This evasion might also be understood as an absence of a theory of politics in the sense that liberal philosophy lacks a theoretical account of political constraints, contestation, and resistance and of what to do in the face of recalcitrance (whether conceived in terms of party dynamics, entrenched interests, or ideological recalcitrance).

A realist theory of politics focuses not only on how political processes affect the realization of political goals but also sees the dynamics of political interactions as radically reformulating political possibilities. The extent to which Gandhi had a clear and distinct theory of politics with strong realist undertones has been, to my mind, drastically undervalued. This realism is the essential counterpart to a means orientation in politics as well as the practical grounds of the politics of nonviolence. Gandhi's theory of politics focuses on the moral-psychological dimension of political interaction and contestation, especially the tensions and temptations that propelled modern politics in the direction of escalating conflict and violence. My claim here is not that Gandhi's understanding of these dynamics is convincing in every detail or that it is the only plausible realist theory available. Rather, exploring Gandhi's understanding reveals a great deal about what nonviolence entails as a practical political orientation and as a set of strategic responses rather than simply an ethical stance or standard of moral judgment. The two interrelated aspects of Gandhi's theory of politics to which I wish to draw attention are the origins and legitimation of violence and the dynamics of escalation. In sum, they represent the twin dangers of political life. Thus Gandhi's challenge was to demonstrate how satyagraha could appropriately respond to these dangers; that is, how it could work as a mode of effective political action that neither enabled escalation nor justified and reenacted coercion.

Cycles of Violence

For Gandhi, at the metaphysical level, himsa or violence is an ever-present feature of life. In Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist thinking, himsa is understood as harm or injury to any living being. In what is usually considered the most radical interpretation of the doctrine, Jain monks take great care to only eat food prepared by others, clear walking paths of insects before treading, and filter water or wear masks to avoid destroying microscopic life, all the while accepting that some forms of injury are unavoidable. Gandhi similarly took the fact that basic bodily functions necessarily involved himsa as a sign of its ineradicability. One common ethical response to the problem of himsa is the renunciation of action, an imperative to make one's footprint in the world as infinitesimal as possible and to practice a variety of forms of nonattachment to body and world. In contrast, Gandhi held to a notion of renunciation that “should be sought for in and through action” ([1928b] 1999, 131). The answer was not a negative withdrawal from the world, but rather a form of detached or selfless action that aimed at actively minimizing harm and suffering (Gier Reference Gier2004, 28–39, 51–65).

Gandhi's turning of ahimsa (nonviolence) outward, as an imperative to relieve worldly suffering, signaled a much broader understanding of the sources and consequences of himsa. In translating the metaphysical doctrine into avowedly social and political terms, Gandhi effectively reinvented the theory of ahimsa in a manner that often dismayed traditional adherents (see Parekh Reference Parekh1989b, 120–55). Gandhi was often piqued by dogmatic forms of ahimsa that “made non-killing a blind fetish” and were seemingly motivated more by the care of one's soul than the suffering of others:

Based on this more expansive understanding of himsa, Gandhi came to emphasize structural aspects of violence in a host of social, economic, and political institutions. He famously declared the modern state to represent “violence in a concentrated and organized form” ([1934] 1999, 318), exemplified both in its coercive capacity to enforce obedience and in its tendency toward centralization and hierarchy (Mantena n.d.). Likewise, he took industrial economies to be premised on institutional centralization, exploitation, and inequality.

What concerns us here, more than its structural aspects, is violence as a dynamic feature of political contestation. For Gandhi, political action—like all action—intervenes in a complex causal web. Action initiates irreversible chains of cause and effect, which Gandhi understood to be so intricate as to be unknowable and therefore unmasterable in any deep or final sense.Footnote ¹² The political analog of the metaphysical problem of himsa was therefore an understanding of politics as necessarily interactive and deeply consequentialist, where chains of intentionality and responsibility reverberate in unforeseen and unintended ways. One fundamental implication of this view is that individual will, intention, or motive alone cannot fully exhaust, master, or determine the outcomes of political action.Footnote ¹³ To admit indeterminacy in the face of the interactive logic of politics, however, is not to foreswear attempts to shape political trajectories. Here the analogy with Gandhi's response to himsa assumes added force: Rather than abjuring the consequentialism of politics and recommending withdrawal, Gandhi put forward a model of self-limiting action, action that could do as much as possible to internally constrain these negative effects and still work toward positive political goals.

ConsequentialismFootnote ¹⁴ of this kind demands attention to the mechanisms that interactively shape political outcomes, especially the recurring entailments of political action. By entailments, I mean effects and consequences of particular kinds of political action that may not be logically given in the nature of political ideals or intended by political actors but nevertheless regularly recur as their reactive outcome. For Gandhi, the problem of political entailment was especially acute in the case of violence, for in being an absolute, irreversible deed, violence initiates definite dynamics of resentment, retrenchment, and retaliation—or what is often prosaically referred to as the cycle of violence. Even when committed for the sake of justice or a final peace, violence necessarily puts into motion chains of animus and dissension that ultimately result in instability. Overt violence was merely an extreme instance on what was, for Gandhi, a very expansive spectrum of forms of force, domination, coercion, and imposition that themselves seemed definitive of modern politics. Even ostensibly mild forms of coercion—for example, when a democratic majority adopts legislation that is unpalatable to a minority—can initiate similar dynamics of antipathy and hostility that likewise lead to insecure and illegitimate outcomes.

The subjective—or moral-psychological dimension—of violence is equally important in the manner of its justification. Implicit in the turn to violence is a claim to infallibility; according to Gandhi, however, human beings were “not capable of knowing the absolute truth and, therefore, not competent to punish” ([1921b] 1999, 451). Gandhi's objection here is often construed as an epistemological critique of violence, founded on a conception of truth as many-sided.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet for Gandhi, the posture of infallibility was also a moral-psychological one; it was a problem of pride and, at the same time, of weakness and cowardice. The extreme irreversibility of violence demands hubris in its undertaking and in its continued justification, a precarious subjective orientation that makes acknowledging errors of judgment and policy reversals difficult and rare. For Gandhi, the fortitude that accompanies violence was a brittle posturing, a papering over of ego-driven investments. The militant Hindu “who will protect by force of arms a few cows but make away with the butcher” and the militant nationalist “who in order to do supposed good to his country does not mind killing off a few officials. . .are actuated by hatred, cowardice, and fear. Here love of the cow or the country is a vague thing intended to satisfy one's vanity or soothe a stinging conscience” ([1916] 1999, 253–54). Conviction is motivated by a need to protect and project one's self, betraying an egotism grounded in weakness rather than, in Gandhi's terms, a genuine and detached commitment to truth.Footnote ¹⁶

Finally, Gandhi was concerned with the long-term, unintended consequences of violence; namely the ways in which violence attains moral and political legitimacy. For Gandhi, when coercion is deemed rightful conduct against recalcitrant opponents or enemies (again, this can apply both to the extreme case of war/revolution or everyday modes of democratic politics), the result is that everyone is more inclined to become power seekers, either for protection or as emulators, and thus all become accustomed to and accept competitive domination as the preeminent mode of modern politics. Far worse than individual acts of violence or demonstrations of force is therefore the universal respect given to the capacity for imposition such that power and domination appear as markers of legitimate authority. This was the foundation of Gandhi's exhortation in Hind Swaraj to Indians to find a mode of resisting British rule that did not at the same time emulate (and thereby legitimate) imperial claims to authority. Gandhi famously claimed that “the English have not taken India; we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them” ([1909] 1999, 261). For Gandhi, it was not the mere preponderance of force that brought or kept India under British rule but Indian weakness. Emulation and the turn to violence were marks of this weakness; they demonstrated the continued acquiescence to the logic of imperial conquest and legitimated material domination as an acceptable foundation of political authority (see Nandy Reference Nandy1983).

Affect and Escalation

The second feature that was fundamental to Gandhi's understanding of politics was the inherent tendency towards escalation in conflict. The problem of escalation is closely tied to an idea of political action that emphasizes its interactive effect in complex causal sequences. Political conflict, confrontation, and antagonism characteristically proceed through a dynamic logic of actions, reactions, and counter-reactions. Again, for Gandhi, these dynamics of contestation include moral-psychological elements that drive them beyond mere conflicts of interest. The performative aspect of political interaction transforms political actors’ motivations and subjective investments. Therefore to speak of the ways in which violence (or coercion or contestation) expectedly leads to forms of entrenchment, resentment, and mutual hostility is to call attention to the central role of affect in political life. As we have seen, Gandhi was especially attuned to this particular dimension and took passions such as pride and egotism—and their derivatives such as anger, ambition, humiliation, insolence, revenge, retaliation, etc.—to be key forces for understanding the structure and psychology of violence and escalation. Thus undercutting or moderating these same passions would be central to the dispositional politics of nonviolence. Humility and fearlessness must be cultivated to avoid the slide into the egotism, hubris, and cowardice that engender violent escalation.

To note the importance of people's emotional and psychological attachment to belief is also to recognize distinct limits to rational persuasion in politics. For Gandhi, political conflicts, even when based in a rational conflict of interest—between landlord and peasant, upper caste and lower caste—have a tendency, in and through contestation, to take on an increasingly ideological character. In particular egoististic passions are activated and heightened when beliefs are questioned and contested, as they inevitably are in the realm of politics. In such situations rational argumentation and moral criticism are ineffectual or, worse still, counterproductive, because repeated attempts to demonstrate the rightness of one's position and the correlative wrongness of one's opponent's elicit resistance. As Bilgrami has provocatively argued, criticism for Gandhi can never be pure in motive, and moralizing criticism directed at others is easily susceptible to corruption (egotistic investments) and has “the potential to generate other psychological attitudes (resentment, hostility) which underlie inter-personal violence” (2003, 4136). Here contestation stirs the passions that more often than not result in entrenchment and escalation rather than moderation and agreement.

In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi offered the following parable to outline the manner in which a response to injustice can easily lead to an escalation that undoes the conditions of a just resolution. In this example, the dynamic of confrontation begins with a thief illegitimately stealing your property. Full of anger, you resolve to punish the thief who has stolen from you, “not for your own sake, but for the good of your neighbours.” You organize an armed band to counterattack; the thief responds defiantly and “collects his brother-robbers” and “pesters your neighbours,” who complain that the robber has only resorted to open threats against them “after you declared hostilities against him.” You feel badly that you have exacerbated the situation but feel trapped. Knowing you will be “disgraced if you now leave the robber alone,” you instead distribute arms to all your neighbors “and so the battle grows . . . the result of wanting to take revenge upon the robber is that you have disturbed the peace; you are in perpetual fear of being robbed and assaulted; your courage has given place to cowardice” ([1909] 1999, 288–89). One of the overt lessons of this story is that choosing the improper means to respond to injustice can have unintended and deleterious consequences: more violence, injustice, and instability. The parable also shows how the investment in and motivation for seeking justice and redress are imbricated in the agent's sense of self such that this investment itself becomes a vehicle for escalation and a barrier to reaching a lasting and just resolution. The attachment to principle, perversely, becomes more important as the consequences become negative or less tangibly beneficial. And principled conviction functions as an alibi for a violence born of weakness.

Means and Ends

A primary tenet of Gandhi's realism was his insistence on a means orientation to politics. This orientation serves, on the one hand, as an antidote to the kinds of disjunctures between means and ends characteristic of political idealism and of instrumentalism; on the other, it pointedly frames politics in terms of the problems and possibilities of political action. To prioritize means does not dispense with the question of ends, but instead seeks to reformulate its reciprocal relationship to means. Gandhi's understanding of means and ends to be, in his words, “convertible terms” ([1924d] Reference Gandhi1999, 497) suggests two kinds of articulations. In its stronger version, convertibility implies a very tight imbrication such that means would have to embody their ends. In Hind Swaraj, for example, Gandhi offered an organic metaphor that seemingly so intertwined means and ends that no end could function as such, or ever come to light, if it were not already given in the means used to attain it: “[T]here is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree. . . . We reap exactly as we sow” ([1909] 1999, 287). In the strong version, then, means are ends-creative; action consistent with this view might take the form of exemplary or principled action (in the Arendtian sense), in which the principle or end is expressed and entailed in the act (Horsburgh Reference Horsburgh1968, 41–53; cf. Dalton 2003). Gandhi's understanding of swaraj or self-rule may be the clearest instance of an end that is constitutive of the act itself. As is well known, Gandhi repeatedly distinguished swaraj for India from the mere fact of political independence from Britain. Self-rule for Gandhi was premised on a fundamental moral-psychological transformation, an overcoming of fear, and in this sense, it was an immanent achievement that could not be granted or given by the British. Politically, swaraj was attained through individual and collective practices of self-rule that worked to make British rule irrelevant. In this, Gandhi contended that “the attempt to win swaraj was swaraj itself.”Footnote ¹⁷ The need for full convertibility between means and ends is especially urgent in the case of abstract ends such as swaraj. Abstract ends need grounding in immediate, intimate, and precise practicesFootnote ¹⁸ as a way to ward off the temptation to look for “short-violent-cuts” for temporary but ultimately self-defeating gains. Gandhi therefore refused any abstraction—temporal or conceptual—of ends from means, because it was precisely that separation that opens up the possibility of coercion, a point Mehta eloquently elaborates (2010a, 369).

In a second and more strategic sense, reciprocity between means and ends implies a vigilance in which it is crucial “to adopt means to fit each case” ([1909] 1999, 288) and creatively enact a variety of nonviolent methods and dispositions to overcome resistance to transformative action—for it is also in the gap between means and ends that projects of political reform and transformation run aground. Here, Gandhi's varied agenda for social and economic reform illustrates well the idea that the means adopted determine the extent to which the goals of reform can be progressively realized. In the case of caste equality or Hindu–Muslim unity—two central components of Gandhi's constructive program—means and ends come together in that the transformation of relations of mistrust, domination, and inequality is at once both the goal and mechanism of reform. Moreover, in enacting reform—as well as the collective goal of self-rule—political action takes place sequentially and in shifting contexts, within and through political engagements that are more interactive and iterative, and therefore necessarily more strategic than what is implied in the strong reading of exemplary or principled action.

Discipline and Suffering

If the prioritization of means defines the orientation of satyagraha, its substance lies in suffering. For Gandhi, “non-violence in its dynamic condition means conscious suffering” ([1920e] 1999, 135). Tapas/tapasya, usually translated by Gandhi as both self-suffering and self-discipline, was therefore the distinguishing feature of all modes of nonviolent action and key to their effectiveness.Footnote ¹⁹ For Gandhi, suffering properly practiced was noncoercive, and its mode of operation forestalled and disrupted the escalating logic of politics. Moreover, the disposition toward sacrifice implied in suffering allowed for self-correction and self-examination, a disciplined humility that was performed and cultivated through detached action. In the disciplined suffering that nonviolent action seeks to dramatize, these aspects coalesce to enable a distinct process of resolution, which Gandhi strikingly termed a dynamic of political conversion.

The literal meaning of satyagraha is “truth-force” or the search for and insistence upon truth ([1921b] 1999, 451–52]; [1925c] 1999, 64, 93; cf. Parekh Reference Parekh1989a, 143). Truth, for Gandhi, was absolute and universal; indeed it served as another name for God. At the same time, Gandhian truth lacked any positive, substantive definition; it was a name for an absolute that was in principle unknowable and inaccessible in any final or total sense. Thus, insistence on it went hand in hand with a view of truth as necessarily many-sided (Bondurant Reference Bondurant1958, 17). Each individual not only had his or her own path to truth but also knowledge of it was only ever partial and always liable to be incorrect. To recognize fallibility was to accept that people's (partial) views of justice will necessarily conflict, “for what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other” ([1920a] 1999, 206). For Gandhi, “the main reason why violence is eliminated” in satyagraha is because the satyagrahi (the nonviolent actor) “gives his opponent the same right of independence and feelings of liberty that he reserves to himself, and he will fight by inflicting injuries on his own person” ([1920b] 1999, 217). By turning the onus of action—the responsibility for the consequences of action—inward in this manner, suffering becomes noncoercive in its outward effect. When this kind of truth-force turns out to have mistakenly used (i.e., in a cause that is unjust), then “only the person using it suffers.” The disciplined satyagrahi does not “make others suffer for his mistakes” ([1909] 1999, 293) and instead turns the consequences of failure inward, into acts of self-examination and correction. Most importantly, suffering functions to interrupt the dynamic of escalation. As Niebuhr thoughtfully noted, by enduring “more suffering than it causes,” satyagraha “mitigates the resentment” of the political opponent, “resentments which violent conflict always create” (1932, 247).

The charged language of self-suffering has the tendency to evoke heroic, even masochistic, feats of self-abnegation; yet following Niebuhr, self-suffering might be better described as disciplined action—free of personal resentments and ambitions—that demonstrates this detachment through action that involves the willingness to sacrifice (Niebuhr Reference Niebuhr1932, 246). To suffer meant to fully bear the burdens of acting; it demanded that acts of protest, resistance, and reform involved the sacrifice of something from which one benefits and the risk of severe consequences, from ostracism to violent reaction. In the context of noncooperation with authority, whether in the form of a boycott of state institutions, civil disobedience, or labor strikes and work stoppages, the act would prove most efficacious, most demonstrative of conviction, when the satyagrahi visibly sacrificed tangible benefits (in terms of money and prestige) and bore adverse consequences (such as being jailed or fired) in a forthright and disciplined manner.

For Gandhi, the mitigation of resentment was only one side of what made conscious and deliberate suffering effective. Suffering, for Gandhi, “appeals not to the intellect, it pierces the heart,” working not by persuading but by converting political opponents ([1939] 1999, 196). Conversion was therefore associated with a kind of action that was more affective than intellectual in orientation and effect. Although most directly opposed to coercion, conversion was also contrasted to persuasion and condemnation, where the latter implied modes of argumentation and criticism that inhibited moderation and bred hostility. For Gandhi, as was noted before, reason and rational argument had distinct limits in politics. Reason could easily cover over and engender obstinacy, self-righteousness, and dogmatism. Indeed Gandhi thought that deeply held beliefs and principles were almost always less rational than they might appear, and the intellect worked hardest to supply arguments and proofs for beliefs that had their origins and grounding elsewhere. However, suffering enabled a different kind of reasoning:

Gandhi held that dramatic displays of commitment—through acts of conscious and willed suffering—would effectively weaken entrenched positions. Disciplined and self-effacing action triggered an opening and rethinking of commitments, enabling a new form of reason “strengthened by suffering” ([1925b] 1999, 382).

Gandhi was acutely aware that an unrestrained or egotistic politics of conviction was especially liable to engender a logic of escalation. He therefore insisted that nonviolence could not be a movement of “brag, bluster, or bluff,” but rather one premised on the cultivation of “unobtrusive humility” ([1921a] 1999, 203). Not bravado or brinkmanship but the performance of self-effacing and self-sacrificing acts would do the political work of demonstrating firmly held political convictions and compelling attention to them. Nonviolence avoids condemnation in the form of criticism and judgment of the actions of others, since “the more it speaks and argues, the less effective it becomes” ([1936] 1999, 402). Rather than enhancing its power through moralizing, the convincing action of the nonviolent agent

To be effective, acts of suffering required discipline, where discipline meant learning to detach the self from desire for the fruits of action and the egotistic investment in principles. The dispositional training for satyagraha therefore required a cultivation of humility and fearlessness, the willingness to sacrifice one's life and an overcoming of the ego's passions and attachments.

Gandhi's repeated prescriptions to be pure and selfless in motive, coupled with his celebration of personal asceticism, have given great cause to view him as a moral absolutist or ethical purist in politics. He certainly extolled a model of moral perfection in which disciplined purity and self-abnegating humility were central modes and avowed aims. Yet these moral virtues also functioned as distinctly political dispositions on which the success (and not just the moral legitimacy) of nonviolent action depended. That is, the imperative for detached and disciplined action was not just a way to assert the legitimacy or authenticity of the political act nor a sign of the ethical purity of the actor but also a key determinant of the anticipated efficacy of nonviolent action. Purity of motive implied removing all traces of anger and resentment toward one's opponent, as well as personal vanity and ambition vis-à-vis the ends of action, so as not to invite bitterness and antipathy. Selfless suffering likewise was thought to demonstrate the strength of conviction in a nondogmatic manner that interrupted the escalation of mutual hostilities. Therefore, in the context of the theory and practice of nonviolence, the formulation and defense of purity and selflessness, as well as suffering, detachment, humility, and discipline, were avowedly political.

Destructive and Constructive Satyagraha

Destructive satyagraha revolves around the tactics of civil disobedience and noncooperation. It is a mode of militant and direct political action against unjust laws or an unjust political order, an order with which you are in, or place yourself in, an antagonistic relationship. By contrast, constructive nonviolent action is driven less by an urgency to resist, withdraw, or undo existing political authority than by the need to create political bonds and forms of association and authority on a voluntary and noncoercive basis. Constructive action can also function as a form of political judgment, linked to an ethics of effective leadership, of how to make alliances and coalitions, overcome divisions, and solve political disagreement. In constructive satyagraha, we see most clearly how nonviolence was not merely a negative recipe for resistance but the grounds for generative political action.

Nonviolent resistance in the form of mass civil disobedience and noncooperation is the clearest example of Gandhi's belief that political authority was ultimately based not on force alone but on some kind of consent, however minimal or unconscious. For Gandhi, the very machinery of modern government necessarily relied on the extensive cooperation of subjects: “Every citizen silently but none-the-less certainly sustains the Government of the day in ways of which he has no knowledge. Every citizen renders himself responsible of every act of government” ([1920d] 1999, 94). Gandhi's radical account of responsibility served to make visible the individual's active (even if unwitting) collusion in the production of authority and thus his or her inherent power and liberty to reject or revise the conditions of consent. The fact that “less than a hundred thousand white men should be able to rule three hundred and fifty million Indians” ([1920g] 1999, 279–80) offered proof that British rule was unthinkable without Indian collaboration. It also attested to its inherent instability (and that of all political regimes) when the actions of government become corrupt, unjust, or otherwise intolerable. “In politics,” Gandhi insisted, the use of satyagraha “is based upon the immutable maxim, that government of the people is possible only so long as they consent either consciously or unconsciously to be governed” ([1914] 1999, 217). Therefore unjust laws and regimes can be radically destabilized by acts of withdrawal of that consent, through a politics of active noncooperation with authority.

At one level, constructive satyagraha was the necessary flipside of nonviolent resistance and noncooperation; it entailed the active creation of new modes of individual and collective self-rule to redeem and reconstitute the political space made available by withdrawal. For Gandhi, in the context of Indian anticolonial politics, the exemplary site for experimenting with constructive satyagraha was the platform of village reform and revitalization known as the “Constructive Programme.” The constructive program was a multifaceted program of social reform that, in its more radical turns, aimed at something like a nonviolent social revolution. It came to enfold an expanding set of social, cultural, and economic reform campaigns—from the promotion of khadi (home-spun cloth) and cottage industries, the abolition of untouchability, and the striving for communal harmony to campaigns for sanitation, education, and prohibition ([1941] 1999). The constructive program was often criticized, especially from within the Congress, for being nonpolitical. It was charged with distracting Gandhi and Congress politics from the goal of capturing state power, for being obscurantist and traditional (this claim was especially directed at the khadi campaign), and for instigating social division when national unity was deemed most urgent (i.e., on the issue of untouchability). However, for Gandhi, in this precise form—centered around village renewal and protection—constructive work was the necessary counterpart to the anticolonial demand. To attain swaraj, the strategy of noncooperation had to be twinned with a positive program of constructing nonviolent forms of rule, authority, and association. In this sense, the constructive program functioned as political preparation for independence, as itself a series of experiments in self-rule.

Moreover, the forms of satyagraha envisioned in the constructive program were also meant to highlight the centrality of, and intimate a model for, the everyday practice of nonviolent politics.Footnote ²¹ These campaigns explicitly eschewed state action or legislation as the means for effecting radical social and economic reform; indeed this rejection is what rendered these campaigns nonviolent. If Gandhi was suspicious of the legitimacy and efficacy of state-directed legislation in general, he thought that the problem of coercive or imposed reform would be most acute in the arena of social and economic life. Imposed reform would not only produce reaction and resentment but also threaten to induce a scale of polarization that could instigate widespread civil conflict and even outright civil war. Gandhi's proposed antidote to the potential escalating spiral of ideological conflict inherent in communal, intercaste, and economic conflict was the radical localization of the arena of struggle for reform. While national in scope, the constructive program was to be conducted as village-level campaigns. For Gandhi, entrenched forms of economic and social oppression (for example, stemming from land distribution and caste inequality) required engagement at an intimate scale, because intimacy set the conditions for conscious atonement and resisted the abstracting logic of ideological competition and stalemate. In a positive sense, localized constructive nonviolence taught satyagrahis to orient themselves toward the reform of that with which they were most intimate; that is, it insisted that political action began from the situatedness of the self in its most intimate worlds.

One of the most striking examples of constructive satyagraha in the realm of political judgment and political leadership was Gandhi's understanding of the conditions for forging Hindu–Muslim unity. Although the creation of greater Hindu–Muslim unity was a central plank of the constructive program, it was by all accounts a deep political failure both for Gandhi and Congress politics, evidenced in the polarizations that resulted in partition. Yet it was Gandhi's involvement with the pan-Islamic Khilafat movement (1919–24) that had initially elevated him to a position of national leadership in the first major mobilizations against British rule. The Khilafat campaign eventually dovetailed with the Non-Cooperation Movement (1920–22), and the period is often taken to be the heyday of Hindu–Muslim solidarity. Despite its later unraveling, the distinctive formula that Gandhi articulated in the period as the basis for Hindu–Muslim unity and friendship remains provocative. Skaria (Reference Skaria2002) and Devji (Reference Devji, Mayaram, Pandian and Sakria2005) have both drawn attention to the novelty of Gandhi's formulation of political friendship as one that is performed through unconditional acts of solidarity. Rather than a strategic alliance of interest, based on a kind of quid pro quo—in which, for instance, Hindu support for the Khilafat demand would be tied to Muslim acceptance of a ban on cow slaughter—Gandhi attempted to “win permanent friendship with Mussulmans” in “a spirit of love and sacrifice independent of expectation of any return” ([1920f] 1999, 119). What Gandhi proposed was not primarily an ideology (or national narrative) that could convince Hindus and Muslims that they shared political interests and goals (or that they already formed a single political community) but a mechanism that could disarm growing enmity and escalating distrust:

Here we see the central mechanisms of satyagraha, suffering and sacrifice, mobilized toward creating the conditions for mutual respect, trust, and equality. Moreover, this attempt required a sensitivity to the nature of the structural and historical relationship between Hindus and Muslims. Thus, the “heart unity” that Gandhi sought could not ignore or deny the difference in status and interests of each community; indeed it was premised on the heightened duty of the Hindu community as the majority community to “surrender out of strength to the Mussalman in every mundane matter” ([1925a] 1999, 159). Trying to create the conditions of unity—overcoming mutual distrust and feelings of superiority/inferiority or insecurity—was, for Gandhi, “essentially the work of Hindus” ([1921c] 1999, 18). That is, it was incumbent on those in positions of power, strength, and security to both accept their responsibility for enmity and actively seek its undoing.Footnote ²²

Context and Coercion

Thus, the techniques as well as the dispositional politics of satyagraha had a different valence depending on the context of encounter. Even the most militant forms of resistance had to take a specific form to produce the right effect and transform structures of political conflict and political authority. As noted earlier, Gandhi saw proper acts of satyagraha as dramatizing self-suffering; resisters had to show that in acts of withdrawal they consciously sacrifice something from which they benefit and “voluntarily put up with the losses and inconveniences that arise from having to withdraw” ([1920c] 1999, 399). Although the aim and form of resistance were intended to break the machinery of government, this end was not to be attained through instilling fear, intimidating, embarrassing, or otherwise humiliating the government into submission:

Gandhi insisted that if the price for acting was borne primarily by the satyagrahi, then whatever coercion existed was internally directed and thus not a form of violence against the opponent. To demonstrate this quality of nonviolence, Gandhi often invoked a distinction between forms of political boycott in which one legitimately withdrew support from an unjust institution (i.e., through disobeying or ignoring the laws of the village headman or district collector) and extreme forms of social boycott that would deny social services or otherwise ostracize or intimidate these same officials. In satyagraha one did not punish the wrongdoer as such; rather one “must combat the wrong by ceasing to assist the wrong-doer” ([1920c] 1999, 399). Gandhi deemed punishment to be outright coercion and hence illegitimate. Moreover, in terming the act “coercive” Gandhi also considered it to be politically ineffective because it targeted individuals rather than institutions and, importantly, accelerated the given dynamics of entrenchment.

There has always been a great deal of controversy about whether the logic of nonviolent protest, especially in its most confrontational moments, actually works in this way or whether it necessarily succeeds on the back of another kind of coercion.Footnote ²³ Gandhi himself declared satyagraha to be a militant and not passive form of resistance, often invoking military metaphors to describe the tactics and discipline of his nonviolent army. It is also clear that in the context of opposing manifestly unjust regimes (i.e., when a regime is deemed incapable of internal reform as was the case, in Gandhi's view, of British rule in India after the Amritsar massacreFootnote ²⁴) escalation would become a conscious strategy. At the same time, even in the context of the broadest calls for general noncooperation, escalation took place in precise stages and had to be tied to specific demands, demands that could be reasonably negotiated or met by opponents. Pure escalation could never become a goal of its own. Thus, at every stage of confrontation, demands had to be publicly declared, justified, and circulated, and avenues for negotiated settlements (including face-saving measures) had to be kept open (Bondurant Reference Bondurant1958, 40). Acts of disobedience and resistance, in addition to being disciplined and defined, thus were meant to work less through humiliating or triumphing over an enemy but by producing conditions for progressive and iterative resolutions.

Context mattered not only in the general sense that it shaped the aims and methods of political action but also in that any particular tactic or technique could be felt as coercive, depending on the specific structure and sequence of confrontation. Gandhi took great pains to establish and justify the precise conditions in which nonviolent tactics could be deployed without inducing escalation or enacting coercion. He devoted enormous energy to clarifying, calibrating, and outlining the exact conditions of disciplined satyagraha; indeed these searching examinations were a central feature of his voluminous writings (especially in his in-house journals, Navajivan, Young India, and Harijan). These responses ranged very broadly, from detailing exacting rituals of daily self-discipline; differentiating retaliatory and productive forms of boycotts, strikes, and work stoppages; to distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate grievances of satyagrahis in prison. Despite Gandhi's careful calibrations of the fine line between coercion and conversion, they often appeared to his critics to be little more than sophistries, and the charge that nonviolence necessarily works through moral coercion has continued to shadow it.

To gauge how complicated the issue of coercion was and how crucial the contexts of political conflict were, for Gandhi, in shaping it, I refer here briefly to perhaps the most controversial tactic in Gandhi's political repertoire and one that most often was seen as morally coercive: the political fast or hunger strike. The majority of Gandhi's fasts were personal acts of self-purification, penance, prayer, and remembrance. Even many of his more public fasts are best understood as acts of self-purification after political failures, to atone for falling short of his own ideals and the lapses of his followers (i.e., when he felt responsible for outbreaks of violence) (Gandhi Reference Gandhi2008, 827–31). However, Gandhi did also fast for straightforwardly political reasons, to influence the course of events, most famously as the prelude to the Poona Pact of 1932 and to quell communal riots at partition. He was acutely aware that fasts could very easily be coercive, and thus he elaborated precise and demanding rules for their undertaking. A fast was always to be a weapon of last resort, used only after all other avenues had been exhausted. To attest to how reluctant Gandhi was to carry out this tactic, it is worth remembering that he at no time fasted against the British government or British rule as such, and never in the name of an open-ended demand for independence. For Gandhi, fasting against a political antagonist or enemy functioned only to escalate bitterness and conflict, because one's enemy would necessarily experience the fast as exhortative and coercive. One could not “fast against a tyrant” but only against those whose consciences could be stirred by the willingness to sacrifice one's life ([1933a] 1999, 377). Only in the context of that kind of relationship—Gandhi called it a relationship of love—would fasting work as moral suasion and not as sheer blackmail. The categories of tyrant and lover had, for Gandhi, “a general application. The one who does injustice is styled ‘tyrant.’ The one who is in sympathy with you is the ‘lover.’” The true satyagraha fast “should be against the lover and for his reform, not for extorting rights from him” ([1924a] 1999, 323). This does not mean that in practice all of Gandhi's fasts conformed to these strict criteria; indeed Gandhi himself admitted his own lapses in this regard. But it does vividly demonstrate the degree to which Gandhi was attuned to the ambiguities of moral coercion in nonviolent resistance and, more importantly, how for Gandhi the question of the appropriate uses of nonviolent action in general was closely tied to an assessment of the contexts and dynamics of specific political confrontations.