Gandhi and modern political thought
emotions like resentment, contempt, and indignation in politics. Our identities are closely bound with our political beliefs and interests. We naturally resent and dismiss those who challenge them, as regularly occurs in competitive politics. Satyagraha engages these passions and dispositions. Its creativity and discipline lessen and disorient them enough that a shift in commitments might become possible.
This is what Gandhi meant when he argued that to get important things done in politics, you had to go beyond reason and mind. You had to reach out to and move the “heart” of those who resist and resent you. In all his campaigns, satyagraha was means for generating opportunities for persuasion and realignment rather than retrenchment and polarisation.
The theory and practice of satyagraha exemplified another general truth about politics that Gandhi underlined — this was the importance of means. Gandhi followed the maxim that in politics “means are after all everything”. Given the sway of negative passions in politics, and the ever-present potential for violence and reaction, the how of politics was given priority over end goals. To Nehru, Gandhi explained, “You have emphasised the necessity of a clear statement of the goal, but having once determined it, I have never attached importance to the repetition. The clearest possible definition of the goal and its appreciation would fail to take us there if we do not know and utilise the means of achieving it. I have, therefore, concerned myself principally with the conservation of the means and their progressive use.”
This was for Gandhi the first, and hardest, question of politics: How to shake people out of their existing rationales and motivate them to transform themselves and their political worlds. Typically, political leaders and activists try to motivate people to act in one of two ways. One is to rely on words over deeds. In Gandhi’s terms, they try to persuade by petitioning, condemning, speechifying, and sloganeering. But slogans not backed by deeds were signs of weakness and powerlessness. The opposite side depends on brute force. Politics is defined by exploiting fear and threatening coercion. Protest politics in this vein relies on the strength of numbers and replays in the street the politics of intimidation. In the language of Hind Swaraj, this is the kind of politics that “assumed that we can get men to do things by force and, therefore, we use force”.
Both were mistaken. For Gandhi, “real strength lies in the absence of fear not in the quantity of flesh and muscle we have on our bodies”. Satyagraha was his way of building strength through deeds and action. It was a form of creative action that could initiate new attachments and alliances. Its greatest legacy was to demonstrate that effective power need not be equivalent to coercive force.