Transforming leadership is elevating. It is moral but not moralistic. Leaders engage with followers, but from higher levels of morality; in the enmeshing of goals and values both leaders and followers are raised to more principled levels of judgment. Leaders most effectively “connect with” followers from a level of morality only one stage higher than that of the followers, but moral leaders who act at much higher levels—Gandhi, for example—relate to followers at all levels either heroically or through the founding of mass movements that provide linkages between persons at various levels of morality and sharply increase the moral impact of the transforming leader. Much of this kind of elevating leadership asks sacrifices from followers rather than merely promising them goods.10
Burns gives to the conception of leadership a normative dimension that Plato stressed but that is often missing in contemporary political science analysis. Burns views the leader as essentially an educator engaged in a creative relationship with followers. Gandhi saw satyagraha as heuristic because it employed a kind of power that encouraged reflection and reexamination of motives, needs and interests. He believed, as Burns suggests, that this educative procedure depended on the development of an engagement of all those involved in a situation “to extend awareness of human needs and the means of gratifying them.” The leader “raises the expectations and helps shape the values” of others while also requiring sacrifices. This is an exact description of the purposes of satyagraha, and when Burns recognizes that there is “a transforming effect on both” leader and led, he states Gandhi’s point that each act of satyagraha sought to move him and the country further on the path to swaraj.
When the concept of swaraj relates to Burns’s theory of transforming leadership, then ideal leaders “must be whole persons, persons with fully functioning capacities for thinking and feeling.” Their sensitivity to the needs of their following enables them to exercise a therapeutic influence of the sort that Nehru identified in Gandhi, as cited in chapter 3: “It was a psychological change, almost as if some expert in psychoanalytical methods had probed deep into the patient’s past, found out the origins of his complexes, exposed them to his view, and thus rid him of that burden.” The passage bears repeating because it relates closely to a description of Malcolm X’s achievement as a leader: “The niche he ultimately carved for himself in history was largely the result of his unique ability to transform his own personal struggle for identity into a universal one, and to liberate his ardent followers from the kind of conflict about skin color that had afflicted him all his life.”11
But more than Malcolm, Gandhi’s particular accomplishment as a political leader was to relate both the power of satyagraha and the purpose of swaraj to the ideal of inclusivity. Erik Erikson comments in this context that Gandhi tried to revive “the more inclusive identity promised in the world religions,” and that the “best leader” is one who can reaffirm these “more inclusive identities” through the techniques of nonviolence.12
Gandhi saw the task of leadership as educative in another sense, that satyagraha must be used to gain the empowerment of those who had never been politicized. Rajagopalachari observed that the purpose of the Dandi march was to manufacture not salt but civil disobedience. Gandhi responded that more precisely it was to use satyagraha to produce swaraj.13 The function of a leader, in this case, was to instruct en masse in the art of nonviolent action for the purpose of personal and political autonomy “by demonstrating that real swaraj will come not by the acquisition of authority by a few but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when abused. In other words, swaraj is to be attained by educating the masses to a sense of their capacity to regulate and control authority.”14
A month before the salt march began, Gandhi stressed this purpose of swaraj: “Mere withdrawal of the English is not swaraj. It means the consciousness in the average villager that he is the maker of his own destiny.”15 Satyagraha alone could develop this consciousness and self-confidence because it empowered people. As Nehru had witnessed from the first use of it in 1919, it worked to overcome the pervasive fear of British authority in India by politicizing the apolitical, including them in a mass movement that demanded assumption of collective responsibility through direct action. From the perspective of political science, this was Gandhi’s success as a leader and as a case study of the dynamics of political movements, it remains a very substantial accomplishment.
Gandhi in Fiction: “Waiting for the Mahatma”
Dramatic reconstructions of Gandhi’s life in film and fiction range from Richard Attenborough’s academy award winner in 1982 to Indian novels like Raja Rao’s Kanthapura and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable that are noted in chapters 2 and 4. R. K. Narayan’s novel, Waiting for the Mahatrria is still another classic of Indian literature about Gandhi. It tells the story of Sriram, a twenty-year-old student in search of swaraj. Gandhi becomes central to Sriam’s rite depassage through his service to India. At their first meeting he is intimidated and Gandhi, sensing this, “looked up at Sriram and said, ‘Sit down, young man. Come and sit as near me as you like.’ There was so much unaffected graciousness in his tone that Sriram lost all fear and hesitation.” But Sriram is so afraid of making a fool of himself that he cannot communicate. Gandhi tried to reassure him saying, “‘By the time we meet again next, you must give me a very good account of yourself.’ He laughed in a kindly manner, and Sriram said, ‘Yes, Bapuji [father], I will be a different man.’ ‘Why do you say “different”? You will be all right if you are fully yourself’”16
From numerous fictional and nonfictional accounts of first-time meetings with Gandhi,17 R. K. Narayan’s depiction of Sriram’s encounter would seem representative. Gandhi’s message to millions, in one form or another, was that “You will be all right if you are fully yourself.” Self-realization became both the means and end. In the novel, Gandhi always seems to be fully himself. Sriram follows him through countless villages, and observes: “He met the local village men and women, spoke to them about God, comforted the ailing, advised those who sought his guidance. He spoke to them about spinning, the war, Britain and religion …. He trudged his way through ploughed fields, he climbed hard rocky places, through mud and slush, but always with the happiest look, and no place seemed too small for his attention.”
Gandhi arrives at a tiny train station, unexpected by the stationmaster, “a small man with a Kaiser-like moustache,” who becomes excited over the Mahatma’s sudden appearance: “The stationmaster panted for breath, and constantly nudged and instructed his children to behave themselves although they were all the time standing stiffly as if on a drill parade. Mahatmaji said: ‘Station Masterji, why don’t you let them run about and play as they like? Why do you constrain them?’ ‘I’m not constraining them, master. It’s their habit,’ he said with the hope of impressing the visitor with the training of his children. The Mahatma said: ‘Friend, I fear you are trying to put them on good behavior before me, I would love it better if they ran about and played normally, and picked up those flowers dropping on the ground, which they want to do. I’m very keen that children should be free and happy.”18
So this is Gandhi as a great novelist portrays him: urging those he meets to be fully themselves, confident that with a gentle lead, individuals will learn the self-discipline and self-awareness necessary for swaraj. This was his method and purpose on the Dandi march, to bring India into its own. This was also his aim with the Calcutta fast except by that time he knew how far India was from swaraj. The irony of the civil war was that while it proved Gandhi right in his warning that independence may not bring swaraj, that proof led him to despair. By the time of the fast, his optimism had been tested beyond its limits. From November 1946, when he began his arduous trek through the riot-torn villages of East Bengal, until January 30, 1948, when he was assassinated in Delhi by a Hindu fanatic, he appeared to exist for one purpose, to lessen the suffering of the civil war. The dream of swaraj seemed distant. Then the result of the Calcutta f
ast restored his vision. It led him to Delhi and inspired him to undertake still another fast, for the same cause of Hindu-Muslim harmony just before his death. The success of this Delhi fast reassured him that the method of satyagraha was still intact and it appears that at the very end he faced the future again, at age seventy-eight, with renewed commitment and confidence. Swaraj beckoned him.
The Judgment of History: What Verdict on Gandhi’s Vision?
Did Gandhi fail? He thought he had, by the standards he set for himself. But what of the historical perspective, the judgment of history? Chapter 3 reported some of his severest critics and among recent historical assessments are those who now judge him harshly as one who “far from being infallible, committed serious blunders, one after another, in pursuit of some Utopian ideals and methods which had no basis in reality.”19 Compare with this the work of Judith Brown, historian of Gandhi, whose three volumes on him constitute perhaps the most scrupulous and fair study of his life and leadership available. Brown concludes her recent biography with this judgment: “Gandhi was no plaster saint. Nor did he find lasting and real solutions to many of the problems he encountered …. He was also deeply human, capable of heights and depths of sensation and vision, of great enlightenment and dire doubt…. But fundamentally he was a man of vision and action, who asked many of the profoundest questions that face humankind as it struggles to live in community.”20
It is the way that Gandhi combined vision and action that gives him, as Brown says, “enduring significance,” a person “for all times and all places.”21 Some historians object that a proper assessment of Gandhi’s significance must rest not with his role and relevance “for all times and all places,” but with what he did in a specific time and place, that is, India in the twentieth century, and that the scope of his contribution there was much less than claimed. This is because the Raj would certainly have left India anyway regardless of Gandhi, perhaps even sooner without him. In any case, the decisive causes of the demise of the British Empire were the two world wars, especially the second and its immediate aftermath, which quickly persuaded the Labour government in England to transfer power. This is a compelling argument but it hardly does justice to the role of the Indian nationalist movement. It misses the point that the movement’s achievement was not merely the attainment of an independent government, but more than that, the method that was developed and steadfastly employed of a nonviolent struggle without parallel in world events. Susanne Rudolph is right that the question of “whether Gandhi did or did not speed Britain’s exit from India” is a “distraction” that overlooks the main point about the way that the movement managed to translate ideas like swaraj and satyagraha into action: “Gandhi’s leadership, regardless of its objective success or failure, had important subjective consequences, repairing wounds in self-esteem, inflicted by generations of imperial subjection, restoring courage and potency, recruiting and mobilizing new constituencies and leaders, helping India to acquire national coherence.”22
India has emerged since Gandhi’s death as a democracy—indeed it remains the world’s largest—and Gandhi’s vision was of a democratic India. However India may differ today from that vision, it does survive unlike most other nations of comparable economic development or colonial legacy as a country with working democratic institutions that have served intact since its independence. Gandhi’s theory of democracy has been discussed in chapter 3, but we return to it because it remained one of the major ideas that he strove to express in action. “Democracy,” he wrote in 1939, “must in essence mean the art and science of mobilizing the entire physical, economic and spiritual resources of all the various sections of the people in the service of the common good of all.”23 When he was asked in 1940 about the practice of democracy in America, he replied:
My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest should have the same opportunity as the strongest. That can never happen except through non-violence. No country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak. The weakest, you say, go to the wall. Take your own case. Your land is owned by a few capitalist owners. The same is true of South Africa. These large holdings cannot be sustained except by violence, veiled if not open…. The way you have treated the Negro presents a discreditable record…Your wars will never ensure safety for democracy.24
Gandhi’s critique of his contemporary democratic systems has relevance today. His central argument was that exploitation of the weak or poor is a form of “veiled violence,” that this and any other form of violence is incompatible with the democratic ideal. The abiding promise of democracy is for freedom with equality which means freedom from fear and insecurity.
“I value individual freedom,” Gandhi remarked, “but you must not forget that man is essentially a social being,” and “unrestricted individualism” must be curtailed by social conscience “to strike the mean between individual freedom and social restraint.” The task in any democracy is to realize the value of swaraj, “social restraint for the sake of the well-being of the whole society [that] enriches both the individual and the society of which one is a member.”25 This was the vision of swaraj and also of Sarvodaya or social equality that Gandhi sought to express in action. It was an ideal that pitted inclusivity against exclusivity, arguing that the former meant placing the category of humanity above those of caste or class, race or religion because the latter necessarily bred attitudes of domination or dehumanization:
“A variety of incidents in my life,” Gandhi wrote in his Autobiography, “have conspired to bring me in close contact with people of many creeds and many communities, and my experience with all of them warrants the statement that I have known no distinction between relatives and strangers, countrymen and foreigners, white and colored, Hindus and Indians of other faiths, whether Muslims, Parsis, Christians or Jews. I may say that my heart has been incapable of making any such distinctions.”26
This is the vision that other inclusivists like Albert Einstein would recognize as Gandhi’s gift to posterity because, as he would remark shortly after Gandhi’s assassination, “in our age of moral decay he was the only statesman who represented that higher conception of human relations in the political sphere.”27 The vision held power because it grew out of a personal and political experience in which ideas were tested in action. Gandhi’s distinctive quality was not merely his inclusivism, but that plus his statesmanship, his persistent attempts to apply vision to the arena of politics. If it is true that without a vision people will perish, Gandhi’s example shows that an inclusivist vision is not incompatible with political practice, that it may be forged in its crucible, that political leadership and a lifelong career in national politics can permit personal reexamination and refinement of ideas, even when these ideas challenge powerful social or political institutions.
Careers of legions of political leaders in this century suggest that politics is not the place for serious or original thought, that Socrates’s maxim “The unexamined life is not worth living” excludes the lives of politicians. Gandhi’s three decades of national leadership suggest otherwise, that political experience may serve as precisely the right place for testing or perfecting ideals because that is where vision is most needed and ideas most wanted in a field of nonviolent conflict. This is perhaps why George Orwell, in 1949, after writing an essay sharply critical of Gandhi, could nevertheless conclude it on this note: “regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!”28
The clean smell endures today, decades after Einstein’s and Orwell’s judgments. It comes not only from Gandhi’s imaginative use of nonviolence but even more because of his identification of nonviolence with truth, and with the practice of truthfulness. A thorough reading of Gandhi’s voluminous writings uncovers no duplicity: this from a political career that spanned the first half of the twentieth century. Just as Gandhi’s theory of satyagraha insisted on both pursuit of truth and the actual conduct
of truthfulness, so it also related truthfulness to trust. Lying brings distrust and this in turn breeds suspicion and fear. When Gandhi insisted that for the satyagrahi, “an implicit trust in human nature is the very essence of his creed,” so “he will repose his trust in the adversary,” he saw this conduct as a form of empowerment because “Distrust is a sign of weakness and satyagraha implies the banishment of all weakness” as we become liberated from fear.29 Gandhi’s letter to Lord Irwin announcing the plan of the salt march is a classic example of trusting the adversary, denial of secrecy, and consequent empowerment.
Sissela Bok has captured this idea in her analysis of lying in politics and the way that deceit corrodes the value of social trust.30 She aptly subtitles her book “Moral Choice in Public and Private Life,” implying a connection between the personal and the political that Gandhi argued in his theory of swaraj. It was because Gandhi understood and practiced the relationship between truthfulness and trust in both his public and private life that he received abundant trust from his people in return. Bok evaluates Gandhi’s achievement as a political leader in these terms:
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