Mahatma Gandhi

by Dennis Dalton

  It is Malcolm’s journey to personal emancipation that connects him with Gandhi and the idea of swaraj. Malcolm has come to personify a certain kind of freedom that signifies much more than civil liberty or political independence. His life manifests a tortuous quest for inner freedom that does imply, as Gandhi insisted, the achievement of self-discipline and self-restraint with self-realization. Malcolm would have understood Gandhi’s meaning that “The pilgrimage to swaraj is a painful climb.” Ossie Davis conveyed Malcolm’s achievement of swaraj as well as it can be described in the eulogy that he gave to his friend:

  “But in explaining Malcolm, let me take care not to explain him away. He had been a criminal, an addict, a pimp, and a prisoner; a racist, and a hater, he had really believed the white man was devil. But all this had changed. Two days before his death, in commenting to Gordon Parks about his past life he said: ‘That was a mad scene. The sickness and madness of those days! I’m glad to be free of them.’ And Malcolm was free. No one who knew him before and after this trip to Mecca could doubt that he had completely abandoned racism, separatism, and hatred.”76

  Such a transcendence of exclusivist attitudes cannot be easily explained but fortunately Malcolm’s brilliant autobiography is up to the task. A comparison with King’s autobiographical Stride Toward Freedom is instructive: the latter relates in impersonal tones the success of a method but without any journey of the self. Its discovery of satyagraha seems relatively uninvolved in a pilgrimage to swaraj. Only a few pages convey a sense of inner struggle. After its publication in 1958, King produced a vast amount of words, speeches and sermons, essays and articles, but little that conveys swaraj. In contrast, Malcolm’s autobiography was written (with Alex Haley) at the end of his life, and it exudes intellectual energy, personal dynamism, above all, a desire for more growth. Malcolm reports that when a government agent accused him of being a “Communist,” he replied that the only thing that he could be found guilty of “was being open-minded. I said that I was seeking for the truth, and I was trying to weigh objectively everything on its merit. I said that what I was against was strait-jacketed thinking, and strait-jacketed societies.”77

  The point is not that King’s thought or action became “strait-jacketed,” but rather that, as compared with Malcolm’s, it seems relatively static after Montgomery. If King’s early writings are compared with his later, then it is remarkable how little his ideas developed in the 1960s. In his final book, Trumpet of Conscience (published posthumously in 1968), King’s lasting concern with the means-ends relationship is evident, and he courageously applies it to the Vietnam war. He argues that “if we are to have peace in the world, men and nations must embrace the nonviolent affirmation that ends and means must cohere.” This idea had been ignored in American foreign policy, for “every time we drop our bombs in Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace,” overlooking the basic truth that “we must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.”78 Toward the end of his life, then, King, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, an international figure, spoke out bravely and independently on global affairs: the “conscience of the world.” Yet, as King’s star appeared high in the heavens, so, too, it seemed, did the Montgomery experience become increasingly remote.

  Did world acclaim stifle King’s inner struggle? In one sense, it seemed only to increase it, for King was tormented with feelings of guilt and doubt over his real personal worth, and toward the end he suffered severe bouts of depression and agonized preoccupations with death.79 Whereas earlier he had discovered through Gandhi “a means not only of harnessing his anger, but of channeling it into a positive and creative force,”80 now his psychic turmoil blocked creative energy. As the Black Power movement grew around him, he feared that history had overtaken him. Gandhi had those anxieties, too, especially in the late 1920s, before his decisive breakthrough in the salt satyagraha. Might King have achieved in his forties or fifties another leap of consciousness comparable to Montgomery? Racism in America did not give him that chance. We only know that at the end of his life, King repeatedly asked his audiences, “Where do we go from here?” and radical young blacks like Stokely Carmichael would respond, “Martin, baby, you got a long way to go.”81 The most that King could offer was satyagraha. This was hardly enough to satisfy Carmichael or the Black Panthers but it did show King’s persistent attempt to apply Gandhian techniques.

  In a lecture delivered only five months before his death, King decried the “impasse” in the movement. He focused on economic issues, especially the relentless poverty among blacks, and proposed this method of attack:

  Nonviolent protest must now mature to a new level to correspond to heightened black impatience and stiffened white resistance. This higher level is mass civil disobedience. There must be more than a statement to the larger society; there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point. That interruption must not, however, be clandestine or surreptitious. It is not necessary to invest it with guerrilla romanticism. It must be open and, above all, conducted by large masses without violence. If the jails are filled to thwart it, its meaning will become even clearer. The Negro will be saying, ‘I am not avoiding penalties for breaking the law—I am willing to endure all your punishment.’… Mass civil disobedience as a new stage of struggle can transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force.82

  This is a succinct evocation of satyagraha with echoes of Gandhi’s statements during the salt march. There are even lines in this lecture that recall those in a sermon that King gave to his Montgomery congregation in 1959, after his return from India, on Gandhi.83 But unlike Gandhi’s campaigns of mass civil disobedience, this remained a promise unfulfilled, an idea never translated into action.

  Malcolm X embodied the idea of swaraj but not of satyagraha and King the converse, with no American leader managing to combine the two ideas, in theory and practice, as Gandhi did. Perhaps if both Malcolm and Martin had not been assassinated at age thirty-nine, their leadership might have carried the freedom struggle much further. Certainly if Gandhi had been killed at that age, he would be unknown today. Yet time alone is not enough to provide greater effectiveness for most leaders of political movements. In the United States, many such leaders faded into political obscurity. What should not be obscured is the common purpose of liberation that these three remarkable leaders shared. Differences that must persist between Malcolm and Martin are transcended by their unity.84 James H. Cone captures their complementary nature in his comparative analysis. In his eloquent conclusion to the book he uses language that could have come from Gandhi: Martin and Malcolm are important because they symbolize two necessary ingredients in the African American struggle for justice in the United States. We should never pit them against each other. Anyone, therefore, who claims to be for one and not the other does not understand their significance for the black community, for America, or for the world. We need both of them and we need them together…. We must break the cycle of violence in America and around the world. Human beings are meant for life and not death. They are meant for freedom and not slavery. They were created for each other and not against each other. We must, therefore, break down the barriers that separate people from one another. For Malcolm and Martin, for America and the world, and for all who have given their lives in the struggle for justice, let us direct our fight toward one goal—the beloved community of humankind.85

  Malcolm said at the end that his “ultimate objective was to help create a society in which there could exist honest white-black brotherhood.”86 King, in his final “Mountaintop” speech, concluded that “I have a dream this afternoon that the brotherhood of man will become a reality.”87 Few American leaders have illuminated the way to this goal of human brotherhood more brilliantly than they, and their heroic struggles against the awesome tide of racism in their country continue to inspire whites and blacks alike with a vision of humanity that transcends both race and nation, a vision that is vitally and inclusively Ga
ndhian.

  • CONCLUSION

  Gandhi’s Contribution from Various Angles

  “I may be taunted with the retort that this is all Utopian and, therefore, not worth a single thought. If Euclid’s line, though incapable of being drawn by human agency, has an imperishable value, my picture has its own for mankind to live. Let India live for this true picture, though never realizable in its completeness. We must have a proper picture of what we want, before we can have something approaching it.

  —Gandhi, 1946, when ashed about his conception of an independent India1

  To best appreciate Gandhi, we should view his experience from several angles. While we have focused on how Gandhi practiced swaraj and satyagraha, especially during the salt march and the Calcutta fast, these two ideas may also be viewed from a philosophical perspective. They are products of Gandhi’s vision: although he was decidedly an activist, he was also very much a visionary, an idealist, as the above epigraph shows.

  The Idealist Perspective: Plato and Gandhi on Freedom and Power

  Gandhi was hardly the first idealist in politics. Plato was among the first to argue the importance of ideals for politics, even though they might be unrealizable. When Socrates, in Plato s Republic, defends idealism, he asserts:

  When we set out to discover the essential nature of justice and injustice and what a perfectly just and a perfectly unjust man would be like, supposing them to exist, our purpose was to use them as ideal patterns…We did not set out to show that these ideals could exist in fact.

  That is true.

  Then suppose a painter had drawn an ideally beautiful figure complete to the last touch, would you think any the worse of him, if he could not show that a person as beautiful as that could exist?

  No, I should not.

  Well, we have been constructing in discourse the pattern of an ideal state. Is our theory any the worse, if we cannot prove it possible that a state so organized should be actually founded?”2

  Of course, Gandhi was primarily an activist and Plato, a philosopher. But Gandhi, who invoked the metaphor of Euclid’s line, would have accepted the spirit of Plato’s idealism3 and would have agreed with him that “An ideal has an indispensable value for practice, in that thought thereby gives to action its right aim.”4 For Gandhi, an ideal standard of nonviolence does exist and all action must be guided by it. Both thinkers not only put ideas first, but cherish certain ideals as essential in politics.

  When a philosophical perspective on Gandhi is taken further, strong similarities are found with Plato’s idea of freedom. Plato views freedom in the same dual sense as liberation of both self and system and he also identifies freedom with both self-restraint and self-realization. He has Socrates argue that “Genuine freedom” cannot exist in a state where “anyone is allowed to do what he likes,” “subject to no order or restraint,”5 and then invoke a logical relationship between the genuinely free individual and community that also occurs in Gandhi’s thought. Socrates says:

  Bearing in mind, then, the analogy between state and individual, you shall tell me what you think of the condition of each in turn. To begin with the state: is it free under a despot or enslaved?

  Utterly enslaved.

  And yet you see it contains some who are masters and free men.

  Yes, a few; but almost the whole of it, including the most respectable part, is degraded to a miserable slavery.

  If the individual, then, is analogous to the state, we shall find the same order of things in him: a soul laboring under the meanest servitude, the best elements in it being enslaved, while a small part, which is also the most frenzied and corrupt, plays the master. Would you call such a condition of the soul freedom or slavery?

  Slavery of course.

  And just as a state enslaved to a tyrant cannot do what it really wishes, so neither can a soul under a similar tyranny do what it wishes as a whole. Goaded on against its will by the sting of desire, it will be filled with confusion and remorse. Like the corresponding state, it must always be poverty-stricken, unsatisfied, and haunted by fear. Nowhere else will there be so much lamentation, groaning and anguish as in a country under a despotism, and in a soul maddened by ‘the tyranny of passion and lust.’6

  Socrates then concludes that:

  … the happiest [and freest] man is he who is first in goodness and justice, namely the true king who is also king over himself; and the most miserable is that lowest example of injustice and vice, the born despot whose tyranny prevails in his own soul and also over his country.7

  This idea of freedom and its nexus of conceptual connections is not unique to Plato: it occurs in religious theories of East and West. However, from a philosophical perspective, Plato develops with systematic logic the organic relationship between the individual and the community and the respects in which freedom (and happiness) for both demand liberation from fear and ignorance.

  Plato’s ideal state is in many ways the opposite of Gandhi’s democracy because The Republic presents an aristocratic vision of a polity ruled by a philosophical elite. Plato and Gandhi share a love for moral authority but the latter would not allow a concentration of power in the hands of a few Platonic Guardians. As discussed in chapter 3, Gandhi wanted a decentralized democratic system and “True democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the centre. It has to be worked from below by the people of every village.”8 Yet Plato’s conception of power does parallel Gandhi’s in one sense: they agree that since use of power is unavoidable, it can and should be wielded wisely by leaders who are capable because they are liberated from illusion and selfish interest. Plato claims that as a result of his system of education, the enlightened leaders of his Republic will not practice politics as “in most existing states, where men live fighting one another about shadows and quarrelling for power, as if that were a great prize.” They will rather

  think of holding power as an unavoidable necessity…then only will power be in the hands of those who are rich, not in gold, but in the wealth that brings happiness, a good and wise life. All goes wrong when, starved for lack of anything good in their own lives, men turn to public affairs hoping to snatch from thence the happiness they hunger for. They set about fighting for power, and this internecine conflict ruins them and their country. The life of true philosophy is the only one that looks down upon offices of state; and access to power must be confined to men who are not in love with it.9

  If Plato’s theory of freedom is close to Gandhi’s because of the common connections drawn between individual and community, then his idea of power, despite its elitism, connects with a conception of leadership that believes power can be wielded in a disinterested way. Political leaders may know and employ the power of truth because they are engaged in a Socratic quest for wisdom. In Gandhian terms, the satyagrahi must “wrestle with the snake” of political power yet not be bitten by a lust for it. From their mutual perspective, the “internecine conflict” or civil war that they both witnessed and abhorred came from a failure of leadership. Leaders are driven by a love of power because they lack swaraj or any concern for it: they have not found freedom, so they corrupt themselves and their country. Plato and Gandhi shared an optimistic, idealistic vision of the purpose of leadership: to shape a community according to a right set of moral values “that brings happiness, a good and wise life.”

  Political Movements: Gandhi as “Transforming Leader”

  This discussion of leadership suggests another perspective on Gandhi—from the point of view of political movements. James Burns in his study of leadership distinguishes between two types of leaders, the “transactional” and the “transforming.” The former is the typical sort of power broker or wheeler-dealer common to most political situations, whether at the national or local levels. The latter is rare, a leader who tries to create fundamental change through a transformation of public attitudes and values. Burns concentrates on defining and explaining the idea of transforming leadership, citing the example of Gandhi in particular. The
theory applies both to the ideas of satyagraha and of swaraj. Burns writes:

  Transforming leadership ultimately becomes moral in that it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leader and led, and thus it has a transforming effect on both. Perhaps the best modern example is Gandhi, who aroused and elevated the hopes and demands of millions of Indians and whose life and personality were enhanced in the process. Transcending leadership is dynamic leadership in the sense that the leaders throw themselves into a relationship with followers who will feel “elevated” by it and often become more active themselves, thereby creating new cadres of leaders…. The search for wholeness—that is, for this kind of full, sharing feeling relationship—between “teachers” and “students,” between leaders and followers, must be more than merely a personal or self-regarding quest. Fully sharing leaders perceive their roles as shaping the future to the advantage of groups with which they identify, an advantage they define in terms of the broadest possible goals and the highest possible levels of morality. Leaders are taskmasters and goal setters, but they and their followers share a particular space and time, a particular set of motivations and values. If they are to be effective in helping to mobilize and elevate their constituencies, leaders must be whole persons, persons with fully functioning capacities for thinking and feeling. The problem for them as educators, as leaders, is not to promote narrow, egocentric self-actualization but to extend awareness of human needs and the means of gratifying them, to improve the larger social situation for which educators or leaders have responsibility and over which they have power. Is it too much to believe that it is “the grand goal of all leadership—to help create or maintain the social harbors for these personal islands?” Gandhi almost perfectly exemplifies this …. The transforming leader taps the needs and raises the aspirations and helps shape the values—and hence mobilizes the potential—of followers.