Gandhi's leadership, vision of sacrifice and the ends of universalism

For instance, he described how evil prince Duryodhana’s army (in this epic) was only able to hold together because of these negative virtues of non-violence and non-cooperation, which often manifested in other forms of goodness. He argued that no matter how evil the Prince Duryodhana was his army could only cohere because it was brought together by the individual virtues of compassion, bravery, courage, friendship and duty – all of which were negative because they required withdrawing from Prince Duryodhana’s positive visions of conquest and vanquishing the enemy (and other things that determine the positive aims and objectives). Accordingly, even Prince Duryodhana's evil could only depend upon the goodness that was not positive because it could not be seen, literally. It resided in the everyday individual virtues of ordinary army members whose sacrifices, courage, bravery and friendship warranted the army’s survival. It was this invisible network of negatively conceived virtues, which were negative because they were never put on the banner of any leader, that virtue, goodness and non-violence made themselves manifest.

Gandhi was critical about humanity as an ideal for several reasons. One is that the British Empire, like many other European empires, had defined its mission in humanitarian terms in order to legitimise imperial rule since the consent of its subjects could not justify it. Thus, the empire was there to perform a humanitarian act and in doing so, to civilise its subjects who might not otherwise be willing to be subjected to it. Humanitarianism functioned to eliminate the possibility of politics. Gandhi was appropriately suspicious of it on those grounds, but he was also suspicious of it because of its overweening and universalistic claims. He thought – and he wrote this in his manifesto of 1909 called Hind Swarāj (Indian Home Rule) – that the idea of humanity was empirical. Humanity was a figure that could be cartographically counted, mapped out and used to measure demography. This idea only became possible through technology produced by industrial capitalism and deployed by imperial rule, European imperialism.

Moreover, this desire to map, locate, count and control had become essential to the idea of humanity. It also became critical for thinking about humanitarianism as a way to empirically manifest humanity. These were a couple of reasons why he was very uncomfortable with the idea of humanity and thought that humanitarianism should consist not in this hubristic enterprise of counting, mapping and serving, but rather in every day, individualised forms of sacrifice.

There are those of us who belong to certain races who share similarity and similitude and those of us who don't. Gandhi didn’t see defining the human race itself in these terms as having a racist logic even if it includes everyone within it. All forms of defining the human, which are premised upon these ideas of similarity and similitude, he argued, have been historically violent: that sexual sharing is premised upon the subordination of women, that the sharing of food often results in the hunger of millions, that the sharing of language results in competition and destruction as much as it does in friendship and loyalty, etc.

It's been commonplace now for many decades since Gandhi's own death to see him as a great anticolonial leader. While he was that, he was also much more. It seems that the travails through which Gandhi's image is proceeding at the moment discount him as India's independence leader in several respects. For one thing, he's no longer as popular in India as he used to be. One reason for this is that the Indian nation-state has taken ownership of him, regardless of the government in power, and that he has become merely an icon of the State in India, and therefore someone worthy of being repudiated. The current Indian government is a Hindu nationalist government, which is not keen on Gandhi for ideological reasons. In all, Gandhi has been shifted off his pedestal slightly for these two reasons. Nevertheless, globally, he has been partially disparaged because he’s accused of being a racist during his time in South Africa, for instance. In recent decades, he has been accused by Indian feminists of being a sexist because of his views on women and treatment of his wife. He’s been accused of being many other things besides not least a caste-ist: someone who tried to maintain or so it is argued, upper-caste privilege.

He has become posthumously important as a thinker of non-violence, which he always was. Yet, now, nonviolence is no longer confined to anti-imperialism. It's no longer about the creation of new nation-states. Gandhi has moved well beyond this context. It is fascinating because Gandhi's had a highly contingent and even pragmatic relationship with the nation-state throughout his life. He described himself as a philosophical anarchist. He rejected the idea of the nation-state. He thought the State should be minimal if it should exist at all. He took the anarchist telos of a world in which human beings or societies govern themselves as his ideal. When he was asked what he thought of Lenin, Gandhi responded that he would begin where Lenin ends, which is to say, with the withering away of the State. Lenin put anarchism at the very end of Bolshevism, and Gandhi brought it to the very beginning. Consequently, I think it's this sort of anarchist sensibility that has survived Gandhi as the great anticolonial figure, and I believe it marks the future.