Means Are After All Everything: Gandhi and the Paths to Swaraj

• In Event: Political Theories of Resistance

Abstract

The mutual interdependence of means and ends has become a core feature of theories of nonviolent politics. Martin Luther King, building on Richard Gregg, consistently argued that in nonviolent direct action, the means and ends “must cohere;” moral and constructive ends required equally moral and pure means. But what is perhaps most distinctive in Gandhi’s formulations is that he seems to go beyond notions of mutuality or reciprocity between means and ends to propose an outright priority of means. This has led important interpreters like Raghavan Iyer to remark that “in his extreme moral preoccupation with the means, Gandhi seems to stand alone.” But whereas Iyer presents this dramatic emphasis on means as part and parcel of Gandhi’s moral absolutism – nonviolence as the only truthful and pure means – I want to approach the question in almost inverse terms. Rather than a moralist injunction, the priority afforded to means by Gandhi, I will argue, can be framed as a realist demand for the heightened scrutiny of means and their ethical and political implications.

I will explore the meaning of “means” in Gandhi’s political thought via the historical debate on the means and ends of swaraj, as it played in the 1920s. Between the end of the Non-Cooperation Movement and the resumption of mass disobedience in the Salt Satyagraha, the call for a complete break with Britain would be the rallying cry of the Indian National Congress, culminating in the “purna swaraj” resolution of 1929. Younger and more radical voices within Congress also wanted the movement to forthrightly convey socialist and egalitarian commitments when defining swaraj. In the debate on both aspects of swaraj, Gandhi expressed considerable skepticism of placing such importance on the declaration of ends. To demand of Britain a confirmation of the meaning of swaraj risked reducing politics to sloganeering and exposed the political weakness of the movement. More fundamentally, for Gandhi, the debate on swaraj was rife with confusions about the relationship of means and ends. Gathering consensus around and attachment to a particular meaning of swaraj was being conflated with its realization. For Gandhi, “the clearest possible definition of the goal and its appreciation would fail to take us there if we do not know and utilize the means of achieving it.” To his critics, insistence on means looked like dogmatism, and they often accused Gandhi of privileging nonviolence over swaraj, of giving precedence to his more controversial moral, spiritual, and social experiments over the political fight for independence.

In this paper, through the example of swaraj, I will tease out three different ways in which “means” are understood and prioritized by Gandhi: means as ends; means towards an end; and means as such. I will focus especially on elucidating the last – “means as such” – which is the most original and most elusive formulation.

Author

• Karuna Mantena, Columbia University